Interacting with images – adding functionality to images

databases

Eric Decker

Outline

1. What are our requirements? Where do they

come from?

2. What software do we use to meet these

requirements?

3. Live demo: HyperImage Editor/Reader

Requirements

Pilot project (< one year) with members from:

• Anthropology (South Asia)

• Chinese Studies

• European History

Technical Questions:

• Art History

• Political Science of South Asia

Requirements

Three regional corpora with images from South

Asia, China and Europe depicting „Mothers and

Fathers of the Nation“

Requirements

Rather unsystematic personal collections that

needed to be organized.

• Unicode capability for metadata in Chinese,

Devanagari and Western script

• restricted access and user rights management

Generating requirements

High workload of group members generated the

need for software that is:

• easy to learn and use

OR

• already know to the user

AND

• usable in other projects as well

Requirements

Our group wanted to:

• annotate, discuss and compare

• images, groups of images and image details

• in an asynchronous manner

• present results that stimulate further discussion

Requirements

Cluster is supposed to conduct research in the

humanities not IT.

• use the existing IT infrastructure and contribute

to it

• use readymade software

• cost efficiency

HyperImage

Main development by teams at Uni Lüneburg (inventors)

and HU Berlin

Project webpage: http://hyperimage.eu

The software

• allows to define and annotate parts of images

• allows to link between parts of images

• offers on-/offline publication of the result

• and much more

HyperImage

Three main components:

• Server (Web-Service on GlassFish)

• Editor = Authoring Environment (Web-based, Java)

import objects; add/edit metadata; define image-parts (layers);

export project (PeTAL/XML)

• Reader = on-/offline Publication (Flash)

interactive publication of the project; search; light-tables

Hyperimage Image Processing Architecture

File Server

Hyperimage Server

Web Server

Hyperimage Editor User Interface Hyperimage Reader

Edit

ViewExport

Read/Write

HyperImgae Client (editor)Window for manual defining parts of an image („layers“)

HyperImage

Extensions added by HRA:

• Active Directory authentication

• WSDL interface to HeidICON

Problems with HyperImage

• It is a lot of fun to use -> time consuming

• HyperImage Reader not fully accepted as

publication

• Server installation needs qualified personal

• HyperImage Reader is designed as standalone

product