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Viewing high resolution images on the Internet can be difficult, especially with varying Internet speed around the world. Most solutions generate tiles of these large images at different resolutions allowing for small portions of an image to be displayed with faster response times.  Most image tiling engines and algorithms are focused around geospatial layers and maps while few focus on normal high resolution images.  With HTML 5, more standardized browsers, along with new drawing features allow users to finally annotate (measure, note, draw) on online digital specimen images.  By not focusing on the geospatial coordinate system, we have made use of these same techniques to represent specimen morphometrics, using SilverMeasure.

SilverMeasure (http://www.silverbiology.com/products/silvermeasure) implements a new set of tools typically found in Photoshop and other desktop drawing software packages which allow high resolution images to be viewed and annotated online.  The tools are developed with javascript and the Ext JS 4 framework, compatible with HTML 5 browsers and gives users the ability to create digital measurements, notes, and key-value pairs. Annotations can be exported in XML, JSON, CSV and other formats as needed. Other server-side features include tile management, tile generation, and annotation web services.

To manage the storage of annotation metadata, a central repository has been created for scientific images.  Registered SilverMeasure clients can use this repository to store and load either public or private annotations for all scientific images.  This central repository allows for the following benefits:

• Searching metadata from previously marked species
• Building interactive keys from annotated key-value pairs
• Citing digital measurements for reference
• Citizen science projects for data gathering