JPEG 2000's flexibility with respect to random access, codestream reordering and incremental decoding is highly exploitable in a networked environment. Part 9 of JPEG 2000 is currently being written to define tools for supporting image and metadata delivery in this context. It is currently (June 2003) at the Committee Draft stage; completion of the technical work will take place during the remainder of 2003, and publication is anticipated as ISO/IEC 15444-9:2004.

The main component of Part 9 is a client-server protocol called JPIP. JPIP may be implemented on top of HTTP, but is designed with a view to other possible transports. To facilitate its deployment in systems with varying degrees of complexity, JPIP handles several different formats for the image data returned by the server: these include ordinary image formats, such as complete JPEG or JPEG 2000 files, and two new types of incremental "stream" that use JPEG 2000's "tiles" and "precincts" to take full advantage of its scalability properties. JPIP also supports both stateless and stateful modes of operation, enabling sophisticated cache-modeling to eliminate the redundant transmission of data.

JPIP provides selective access to the image metadata that may be contained within JPEG 2000 files. Although Part 9 is focused on the application of technology from Part 1, including the JP2 file format, it does support some file format extensions from Part 2. A mechanism has also been provided for selection from amongst multiple codestreams in JPX (Part 2), MJ2 (Part 3) and JPM (Part 6) files. Potentially this could be applied to any file format containing images, not just to the JPEG 2000 family of file formats.

Part 9 also defines some new file format boxes for indexing JPEG 2000 files and codestreams. The indexes are based on the same concepts as the JPIP stream types, and may be useful in server implementations of JPIP. They are also intended, however, to enable random access to JPEG 2000 files in the absence of JPIP. For example, the byte-range requests built into an unmodified HTTP (version 1.1) server could be used for this purpose.

The 2KAN consortium is concerned with the development of a demonstrator based on a typical business case to show how the requirements have been addressed, both for on-line and off-line applications.

The key issue on this part is the flexibility and interoperability of the APIs and Protocols (JPIP) which will allow strong interaction with third party applications. The Open Standard philosophy will boost the technology to the industry and will encourage third party developers, system integrators, beta testers, etc. to write additional extensions, APIs and .dll to extend the project's functionality to other applications and collaborative services.

Based on the results of previous studies such as Pandora and J2ktools, the 2KAN partners will continue developing their proposal in terms of interactivity, giving access to all metadata and to details (region of interest) inside the image data, taking advantage of the original structure of the JPEG 2000 file format. Downstream use of the extracted metadata will ensure interoperability.