The inquiry realm:

A networked environment has generated numerous demands on all aspects of information access and hence on metadata schema proponents, metadata creators, tool providers and educational organizations (service providers.)

These demand seems to converge on the desirable outcome of metadata interoperability, but the individual agents that act on the processes and objective technological hurdles have so far impeded its obtainment.

Visual images about any topic are a particular challenge—when we strive to represent or describe them. The difficulty of describing an image is nothing new since whoever assigns descriptors or subjects to a resource, even if from a controlled vocabulary, becomes an author and as such separates herself from the readers (the system users).

What are the user’s expectations about the workings of retrieval systems, we may ask?

As ever larger numbers of individuals gain the means to access online information or the services, such as libraries, that can offer that access for free, the demand for easy to use retrieval system grows louder. The visual image collections are no exception to this trend, on the contrary the social shift to multimedia communication is increasing their center stage position.

Can today’s metadata structures be (or become) the container for the data that would facilitate the indexing of the visual images story, characters, events and spaces as well as mood, emotion, and theme?