Images are an important source of scientific knowledge in many disciplines. E.g. you want to analyse satellite photographs or x-ray images of human livers or symbols of death in Dutch baroque paintings. You study the relevant images closely and compare details of one image with details of another. When you want to share your knowledge you will necessarily also communicate about image details. Using paper images, you can just mark up details of interest with a pencil. But with digital images you either have to make marks by employing an image manipulation software, which is not as widespread and easy to use as current text processing software is. Or you have to describe your findings verbally, such as "... above left is an interesting dark spot in picture No. 1 ... now compare it to picture No. 2 where a similar dark spot can be found nearly in the centre of the picture ..." and so on. Neither the employment of a complex image manipulation software package nor the time consuming and not very precise verbal description is satisfactory and appropriate for everyday use in science. Additionally, any technical solution to the lack of easy-to-use technology has to be Web-based in order to support collaborative research on images. The HyperImage project is concerned with the currently unsolved technical problem of establishing links between image details. Our goal is to develop a Web-based workspace that will enable scientists in any image-oriented discipline to create simple and precise links between images and image details, in a fashion similar to that which until now has been the privilege of text. The HyperImage editor permits scientists to mark details of pictures and create links between images and image details of any scale. It is programmed as a platform independent Java application and is open source (GNU Lesser General Public Licence). Any work in progress can be stored within the Hyper- Image system by an author or group of authors, or it can be exported as XML for further usage outside the HyperImage system. Currently we are testing our software prototype with our HyperImage partners from the faculties of Art History and Biology

Helmers, S.

Kuper, H.

Warnke, M.

English

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HyperImage – Image-Oriented e-Science Networks

Available online at http://www.ges2007.deThis document is under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND Creative Commons AttributionHyperImage – Image-Oriented e-Science Net-worksWarnke/Kuper/HelmersMartin Warnke, Heinz-Günter Kuper, Sabine HelmersKulturinformatik/Rechen- und Medienzentrum, Universität Lüneburg,Scharnhorststraße 1, 21335, Lüneburg, GermanyEmail: {warnke}@uni-lueneburg.dephone: +49 (4131) 677 1202,      fax: +49 (4131) 677 1246AbstractImages are an important source of scientific knowledge in many dis-ciplines. E.g. you want to analyse satellite photographs or x-ray im-ages of human livers or symbols of death in Dutch baroque paintings. You study the relevant images closely and compare details of one im-age with details of another. When you want to share your knowledge you will necessarily also communicate about image details. Using pa-per images, you can just mark up details of interest with a pencil. But with digital images you either have to make marks by employing an image manipulation software, which is not as widespread and easy to use as current text  processing software is. Or you have to describe your findings verbally, such as "...  above left is an interesting dark spot in picture No. 1 ... now compare it to picture No. 2 where a simil-ar dark spot can be found nearly in the centre of the picture ..." and so on. Neither the employment of a complex image manipulation soft-ware package nor the time consuming and not very precise verbal de-scription is satisfactory and appropriate for everyday use in science. Additionally, any technical solution to the lack of easy-to-use techno-logy has to be Web-based in order to support collaborative research on images.The  HyperImage  project  is  concerned  with  the  currently  unsolved technical  problem of  establishing links  between image details.  Our goal is to develop a Web-based workspace that will enable scientists in any  image-oriented  discipline  to  create  simple  and  precise  links between images and image details, in a fashion similar to that which until now has been the privilege of text. The HyperImage editor per-mits scientists to mark details of pictures and create links between im-ages and image details of any scale. It is programmed as a platform in-dependent Java application and is open source (GNU Lesser General Public Licence). Any work in progress can be stored within the Hyper-Image system by an author or group of authors, or it can be exported as XML for further usage outside the HyperImage system. Currently we are testing our software prototype with our HyperImage partners from the faculties of Art History and Biology.1 Problem Description: Reasoning With and Along Trails of ImagesThe invention of print with moveable type has had an immense impact on scholarship and scientific endeavour. Not only has the sheer mass of printed material increased by an enormous amount, allowing everybody to possess 2 Warnke/Kuperand to study books, but Gutenberg’s achievement also helped techniques for the systematic extraction of knowledge from text to flourish:  philological devices, such as the index, the table of contents, the footnote, the cross-refer-ence  and  the  concordance,  founded a  science  of  text,  where  much more could be learned and a far more refined discourse began to be practised than that which was possible by the mere writing and reading of linear text (1). Lately, the Web has further accelerated this development. Search engines are so highly efficient in their indexing of documents, that they could be taken for a new order of knowledge.The situation concerning pictures is quite different. In the book culture, no systematic technique for addressing and referencing images as images and their respective details has been developed. There are, thus, methodolo-gies to describe and to categorise images verbally, similar to ontologies. One of  the  most  famous  is  IconClass  within  the  Hida  Midas  framework.  Al-though the Web has provided us with  opportunities for the extensive use and publication of imagery, an appropriate Web-based technique for referencing images and their constituents as images has as yet not emerged substantially. There are a number of image banks and picture archives that provide rich material, but they all address the image as a whole and restrict searching and indexing to the metadata – i.e. the text – of an image or, as Google Image Search does, look for words in the vicinity of an image.There is, on the other hand, the HTML-structure of clickable image maps to address subregions of an image, but this is, in a scientific context, far too primitive to be used straightforwardly as,  e.  g.,  done in Flickr.  Clickable maps do not offer indexing, i.e. the way back from the referenced to the re-ferring image, they do not offer concordances, nor do they allow image de-tails to be referenced independently from the resolution of the image.Yet all this is of utmost importance when reasoning along trails of im-ages. 1.1 Project Partner HyperGiottoWhen investigating, as our project partner HyperGiotto does, the inherit-ance of iconographic elements from antique sepulchral culture to Renais-sance painting and fresco, there is a strong need to identify image details in any resolution. This requires researching all the images that gave rise to a pictorial citation, whereby identifying the pictorial context from which cita-tions and allusions have been made is of great importance. It is necessary to investigate the corpus of pictorial material, just as is the case with literary text.1.2 Project Partner HyperSculptureThe Cathedral of Santiago di Compostela is a gigantic collection and re-arrangement of mediaeval ecclesiastic sculpture. Since its very beginnings, the cathedral and all the artwork on its façade and interior has been con-stantly torn down and rebuilt. As a result, the arrangement of the sculptures that can be admired throughout the cathedral has a very complicated history that can only be discovered by examining the details of the artefacts meticu-lously. With the possibilities of linking between image details and overview plans, HyperSculpture aims at the reconstruction of the history of Santiago di Compostela.1.3 Project Partner HyperMediaDuring the French Revolution a huge amount of caricature drawings were created in reaction to daily political events. It is therefore of great interest to study the use and re-use of pictorial motives as they travel from flyer to fly-GES 2007 HyperImage - Image-Oriented e-Science Networks 3er. HyperImage is of enormous assistance in keeping track of these traces through pictorial material.1.4 Project Partner HyperTaxonThe  Museum für  Naturkunde (Museum of  Natural  History)  in  Berlin hosts the largest collection of insects in the world. Consequently there is also a vast collection of images capturing crucial details of insect physiology. Hy-perTaxon addresses the variations of physiological detail in the cicada popu-lation on the islands of Hawaii, since this a perfect specimen to study the correlation between habitat and the evolution of species.Verbal denotation by means of the extensive use of metadata or notational systems like IconClass is important when the iconographic classification has been completed.  In the initial  stage of  the investigation of images,  when terms and concepts have not yet been determined, the eye has to be returned to its rightful place. As Mitchell puts it: “The image is syntactically and se-mantically dense in that no mark may be isolated as a unique, distinctive character (like a letter in an alphabet), nor can it be assigned a unique refer-ence or ›compliant‹. Its meaning depends rather on its relation with all the other marks in a dense, continuous field.” (2)This characteristic of imagery as being continuous data by its very nature could not be treated in an appropriate manner in the book culture, but the Web now gives us the opportunity to do so. With HyperImage technology, scholars are able to denote portions of images exactly and, independent of resolution, link them to other image details, group images to build orders of knowledge, put them on light tables, link everything to text, image, video, and Web pages, and do so at every stage of resolution, thus preserving the very special properties of imagery as nondiscrete data.2 Project StructureFour groups of partners have combined to design and develop HyperImage: developers, service providers, content suppliers and users. The partners will leverage their specific capabilities in solving the following subtasks: analysis and practical implementation of research requirements, connecting distrib-uted sources of data, legal and organisational considerations regarding the provision of resources, technical execution, usability, and the assembly of e-Science communities. The core HyperImage group consists of a team at the Humboldt University of Berlin and development partners at the University of  Lüneburg and the company zweitwerk – software engineering GmbH, Hamburg. Individually tried and tested methods and data repositories will be com-bined under the auspices of  HyperImage-Net to form a collaborative and user-oriented research and publication environment.  The entire workflow, from the gathering of data to the publication and long term archiving of res-ults, will be a single integrated system, whereby each stage will be based on open standards and therefore compatible with other systems. The project will develop novel services for scientific research that will engender creative pos-sibilities beyond HyperImage for  the  wider European scientific establish-ment.4 Warnke/Kuper3 Technological Structure The software development is based on common, up-to-date technologies that guarantee the best prospects for future use. In addition, much importance has been attached to ensuring compliance with international standards in order to maximise compatibility. The “HyperImage Editor” will be released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public Licence and, as an open source ap-plication, will be gratis to use and modify. The technical goal is for the Uni-versity of Lüneburg and the Humboldt University of Berlin to provide the HyperImage tools as a Web-based service named HyperImage-Net, which will be free of charge for academic use. A major feature of the editor is its ability to import images and Dublin Core metadata from diverse external repositories. This requires an interface between the source repositories and the HyperImage editor. In order to en-sure that  this  interface gains wide acceptance,  WSDL (Web Services De-scription Language, which has been standardised by the World Wide Web Consortium) has been chosen as the underlying technology.The editor itself is programmed in Java and great effort has been taken to ensure consistent functionality across MacOS X, Linux, and Windows oper-ating systems. A PostgreSQL database forms the backend of the editor, al-though further database management systems may be supported in the fu-ture.Finally, a HyperImage project can be exported into an XML file, ensuring that the images, metadata, and links that have been created in the course of the project are made available to other systems in a neutral, platform-inde-pendent way.Use-CaseA use-case might help to exemplify the basic workflow:1.A researcher has assembled a selection of images in a suitable container (e.g. a "collection") in an external repository. The images and Dublin Core metadata contained in the collection are imported into a HyperImage project over a standardised WSDL interface (using SOAP over HTTP) by means of the HyperImage editor.2.The images and metadata are now stored in the online HyperImage data-base and are available to all researchers involved in the particular HyperIm-age project. Using the HyperImage editor, researchers are able to augment the Dublin Core metadata with project-specific information and to define the areas of interest in images and create links between them.3.Assuming permission has been given by the rights' holders, the HyperIm-age  project,  consisting  of  images,  metadata,  areas  of  interest  and  links between these areas, is exported into an XML file. The images will of course be referenced and not encoded in the XML file itself. The project can then be viewed (but not edited) using the HyperImage viewer, or the XML file can be transformed into another format (e.g. HTML) or imported into another system.GES 2007 HyperImage - Image-Oriented e-Science Networks 5Figure 1: Structure of HyperImage Net4 ConclusionsDigital  media,  together  with  the  WWW,  have  promoted  collaborative work and the technical infrastructure in this regard is well developed. Com-puters and the Web offer the possibility to build collaborative environments that work in an effective manner. And it is possible to publish the highly structured material within the scientific community using the Web and at the same time preserving copyrights and scientific authorship. Using the WSDL interface technology, it is possible to work and think along large image sets, even from image databases that did not conceive of these possibilities be-forehand. HyperImage claims to cover exactly these needs.5 AcknowledgementsHyperImage is being funded by the German Federal Ministry of Educa-tion and Research (BMBF) to the sum of 1.27 million euros. The project will run from 2006 to 2009. We gratefully acknowledge the generous funding of the BMBF and the help and support of Manfred Busowietz and Sabine Gott-stein of the Project Management Agency in the German Aerospace Center (DLR).Also, we give particular thanks to our project partners who provide their specific users' perspective and contents of their disciplines, thus supporting the general technological development conducted by the HyperImage core group; we namely wish to thank Dorothee Haffner, Hannelore Hoch, Claudia Rückert,  Peter  Seiler  (Humboldt  University  and Museum für  Naturkunde 6 Warnke/KuperBerlin) and Hubertus Kohle (Ludwig-Maximilians University München) as well as Lisa Dieckmann and Holger Simon and the people of the network "prometheus - Das verteilte digitale Bildarchiv für Forschung & Lehre e.V.". We are most grateful for their support and cooperation.Special thanks are also extended to our colleague Jens-Martin Loebel for many, many lines of running code. Jens-Martin is a Java wizard who makes something  which  seems impossible,  at  least  from a  mortal's  perspective, work perfectly.Finally, we would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who gave help, support and advice on this project.References1. Michael  Giesecke:  Sinnenwandel  Sprachwandel  Kulturwandel.  Frankfurt  am Main: Suhrkamp 1992. Ivan Illich: Im Weinberg des Textes – Als das Schriftbild der  Moderne  entstand.  Luchterhand Essay. Frankfurt  am Main:  Luchterhand 1991. Walter J.  Ong: Oralität und Literalität.  Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag 1987.2. William J. T. Mitchell: Iconology – Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago, London 1986, S. 67.

Images are an important source of scientific knowledge in many disciplines.
E.g. you want to analyse satellite photographs or x-ray images
of human livers or symbols of death in Dutch baroque paintings.
You study the relevant images closely and compare details of one image
with details of another. When you want to share your knowledge
you will necessarily also communicate about image details. Using paper
images, you can just mark up details of interest with a pencil. But
with digital images you either have to make marks by employing an
image manipulation software, which is not as widespread and easy to
use as current text processing software is. Or you have to describe
your findings verbally, such as "... above left is an interesting dark
spot in picture No. 1 ... now compare it to picture No. 2 where a similar
dark spot can be found nearly in the centre of the picture ..." and so
on. Neither the employment of a complex image manipulation software
package nor the time consuming and not very precise verbal description
is satisfactory and appropriate for everyday use in science.
Additionally, any technical solution to the lack of easy-to-use technology
has to be Web-based in order to support collaborative research on
images.
The HyperImage project is concerned with the currently unsolved
technical problem of establishing links between image details. Our
goal is to develop a Web-based workspace that will enable scientists in
any image-oriented discipline to create simple and precise links
between images and image details, in a fashion similar to that which
until now has been the privilege of text. The HyperImage editor permits
scientists to mark details of pictures and create links between images
and image details of any scale. It is programmed as a platform independent
Java application and is open source (GNU Lesser General
Public Licence). Any work in progress can be stored within the Hyper-
Image system by an author or group of authors, or it can be exported
as XML for further usage outside the HyperImage system. Currently
we are testing our software prototype with our HyperImage partners
from the faculties of Art History and Biology

HyperImage – Image-Oriented e-Science Networks

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