Announcing version 1.0 of CHS Image Services

A recent post described our reorganization of the Homer Multitext project's archival image data.
We have been experimenting for some time with a preliminary internet service for working with canonically citable images.

Today, we are releasing version 1.0 of our implementation of the CHS Image Service, an extension to the CITE architecture's Collections.  The CHS Image Service supports extended citation of images including regions of interest, and provides methods for gathering various kinds of information about a canonically citable image, including retrieving binary image data.  We plan to follow up on this release shortly with a formal specification of version 1.0 of the CHS extension to CITE Collections.  

In the mean time, if you are a developer interested in using canonically citable images, see this summary of CHS Image Services in our overview of the CITE architecture.

If you would like to run your own installation, see this guide to running a CHS Image Service.

If you are an end-user who currently uses HMT apps, you should see no changes at all (except perhaps that the web pages at our reference installation of CHS Image Services, amphoreus.hpcc.uh.edu/tomcat/chsimg/, may have a little nicer skin) — that's a feature of the design of chsimg 1.0.  What you should expect to see over the next year or two is more rapid development of applications drawing on chsimg to incorporate canonically citable images in new ways to visualize and explore the Homer Multitext project's increasingly rich archive.