Content and Context: Imaging's Buzz Words for the '90s.

The article focuses on the latest trends and growth in the field of computer imaging. Some of the people who brought images to the screen are now playing with new layouts for local and world news and other online dissemination. All this and more was featured at the 48th Annual Conference of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology, titled "Imaging on the Information Superhighway," which was held on May 7-11, 1995, in Washington D.C. Walter Bender of MIT Media Lab says that where desktop publishing was the thing in the 1980s, description of context is the challenge of the 1990s. There's an interesting tug of war going on: efficiency vs. effectiveness. While compression technologies have been focusing on decreasing the number of bits used to represent content, at the same time the number of bits used to describe con- tent is increasing, for example, in the addition of indexes and heads. Bender adds that news in the future is about providing richly descriptive data, providing a variety of services to help access and use these data, and being aware of individual and community context. The engineering community will be preoccupied with context during the 1990s, he predicts.