Searching for Digital Pictures; June 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Forsyth, Malik, Wilensky; 6 Page(s)

The Internet and the digital libraries being connected to it can provide access to enormous amounts of information. Retrieving that information efficiently is another matter. Consider archives of still images or film clips: if a user wants to find something as simple as a picture of a horse near water, the only hope today would be that someone had properly captioned all such pictures in advance.

Experience from major archives shows that it is almost impossible to anticipate all likely queries. Furthermore, support for a new class of query--for example, "Show me all pictures that contain a horse and grass"--might require reexamining the entire collection.