The lead article in the September/October issue of D-Lib Magazine release yesterday is on djatoka, the open source JPEG2000 Image Server from Los Alamos National Laboratory. The authors, Ryan Chute and Herbert Van de Sompel describe their effort in the article abstract:

The ISO-standardized JPEG 2000 image format has started to attract significant attention. Support for the format is emerging in major consumer applications, and the cultural heritage community seriously considers it a viable format for digital preservation. So far, only commercial image servers with JPEG 2000 support have been available. They come with significant license fees and typically provide the customers with limited extensibility capabilities. Here, we introduce djatoka, an open source JPEG 2000 image server with an attractive basic feature set, and extensibility under control of the community of implementers. We describe djatoka, and point at demonstrations that feature digitized images of marvelous historical manuscripts from the collections of the British Library and the University of Ghent. We also call upon the community to engage in further development of djatoka.

The article is very easy to read and is a great overview of how they built the djatoka image server. LANL has a demonstration site with images of the Magna Carta from the British Library. The University of Ghent has also deployed a djatoka installation with some digitized pages of a Gregorian choir book. (The text of the site is in Dutch, I think, but you can click on the square boxes to the right of “Fol.” to bring up the images.) LANL has also put together a screencast demonstration of djatoka, included below.

djatoka is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License. The software has a site on SourceForge with forums for discussion. It runs as a Java servlet, so it is pretty much cross-platform. In the image server is the Kakadu JPEG2000 toolkit and the IIPImage JavaScript Viewer toolkit. One other key piece is a fascinating use of an OpenURL ContextObject to carry the service request information from the browser through the image server to the caching and rendering pieces.

Congratulations and kudos to Ryan, Herbert, and the team at LANL for putting together this great piece of software and releasing it as open source.Ryan Chute, Herbert Van de Sompel (2008). Introducing djatoka: A Reuse Friendly, Open Source JPEG 2000 Image Server D-Lib Magazine, 14 (9/10) DOI: 10.1045/september2008-chute