[Commons-l] Djatoka

[Andrew Gray]

On 11 March 2010 09:58, Michael Peel <email at mikepeel.net> wrote:

> I would love to see something like Zoomify/SlippyMap for all image on
> Commons (or even direct on Wikipedia) as a way of zooming in on
> detail rather than needing to download the whole image - presumably
> that's essentially what Djatoka does?

There's a good article on the implementation of Djakota here:

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september08/chute/09chute.html

(I was very taken by it when I looked into it for a project at work a
year or so back, but that sadly never got off the ground...)

It seems that the main benefit of Djakota is that it's an elegant and
open-source front end built upon JPEG 2000; it's this, the actual
image format, which allows things like progressive loading from set
coordinates within the image rather than downloading the entire file.
You need the software to handle them, but you're not tied to a
specific implementation.

If we can generate these source files (there are vague worries about
licensing, but to my untrained eye it seems okay) and store them
without size issues then we'd have two options:

* run a seperate system for viewing very large files, which we hand
the user off to, perhaps in a popup window; run this on Djakota or
something very like it, hosted locally, and make it seem as seamless
as possible

* integrate the "image browser" into MediaWiki itself, like we
integrate the existing media players.

Technically, I have no idea which of those would be more desireable or
less headachey - anyone?

I do agree entirely that something like this is quite desirable; even
if we don't have many individual items requiring this sort of
capability now, build it and they will come...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk