Tenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Many image information systems do not satisfactorily perform the administration of the photographs that will become part of their collections; this generates photo- graphic collections that are inadequate and/or not pertinent. In general, the works of photo identification and its denotative description are not done properly, as they give more emphasis to its purely visual aspect. In most cases, when the connotative interpretation of its context is done, one does not delimit or direct the thematic discourses that photography might possess and, when one does it, the work is almost always disassociated from the objectives and characteristics of the image bank. In most of that work done, there is no concern with two factors related to photographic image: its visual and technical qualities—both highly relevant to the user and without which, photography might lose much of its informative potential. Consequently, the user mostly often has to perform searches in more than one image bank, using as parameters not only the theme of one’s research object, but several related themes within which one expects to find what is searched. Subsequently, in many cases when one finds the material searched, it does not hold the adequate dis- courses or it lacks technical and visual qualities that enable its use. Generally, these failures are the result of the inexistence of technical tools to assist the work developed by professionals in many image banks, in the selection/acquisition, analysis, thematization, indexation, storage and retrieval of photos.