Locating an Item in Place and Time

Use Case

You have one or more IIIF resources that have a date and a location associated with each, and you would like to provide these to a client for use in the user interface. For instance, you may wish the client to provide a visualization in a timeline with an associated map, or to provide the capability to filter the set based on a date range or a bounding box on a map. The data required to meet this use case can be provided by the use of both the navDate and navPlace properties on the IIIF resources.

Implementation Notes

The navDate property, as implied by its name, allows a Manifest to identify a pertinent date associated with an IIIF resource in order to help viewers provide users with date-aware navigation. Clients are not required to make use of navDate, and clients that do have date-aware navigation available may not default to that navigation interface. This property is described in Navigation by Chronology

The navPlace property is analogous to navDate, but provides geographic information. The value for navPlace is a single GeoJSON Feature Collection. A Feature Collection represents an aggregation of spatially bounded areas. This property is described in Locate a Manifest on a Web Map.

The navPlace property is not processed by the Universal Viewer or Mirador viewer at this time.

Example

The example consists of a Collection that references five Manifests. All five Manifests contain the navDate and navPlace properties, as shown below.

The example can be displayed in a custom viewer. In the viewer, click on the “Limit by Date Range” button to sort the objects by date. Adjust the ends of the timeline slider to filter the objects based on a date range.

In a more limited way, the Collection can be displayed in the Navplace viewer used elsewhere in this cookbook. This viewer will show all examples places appropriately on a map, but ignores the navDate data.

NavPlace and NavDate Collection

JSON-LD | View in Navplace Viewer