What is IIIF?

The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is a set of technical specifications built around shared challenges in cultural heritage access. More than the technical specifications, IIIF is a community of software, tools, content, people, and institutions solving image Interoperability challenges.

From http://iiif.io/about/:

IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) has the following goals:

• To give scholars an unprecedented level of uniform and rich access to image-based resources hosted around the world.
• To define a set of common application programming interfaces that support interoperability between image repositories.
• To develop, cultivate and document shared technologies, such as image servers and web clients, that provide a world-class user experience in viewing, comparing, manipulating and annotating images.