The documentary analysis of photographs and images constitutes a branch of Documentation with great potential for automation and technological-documentary development. In this field, in 2010, the development of the Photon program was initiated as an exhaustive cataloging model capable of identifying, describing, and registering any type of photograph for effective retrieval. It was initially used as a teaching tool for the course in Photographic Documentation, which had been taught that same year, to illustrate the automation of digital photographic collections and their cataloging. The first version of the program was partially completed in 2011, resulting in the most comprehensive analysis schema ever conceived for a photograph, featuring more than 100 description fields specifically designed to record every possible point of access for different types of images (scientific, forensic, historical, informational, administrative, legal-judicial, etc.).
This descriptive capability was significantly enhanced by introducing the concept of photographing the photograph, that is, the ability to generate crop sections of a photograph for specific identification and description. This allowed obtaining detailed images from an original image and enabled retrieval based on graphical details, thereby multiplying the possibilities of success in terms of relevance and pertinence of queries. With this innovation, a prototype version of the Photon program was developed and presented at the International Conference on Information and Documentation Systems IBERSID in 2012 under the title «Development of a Photographic Cataloging and Management System: Photon». In the same year, the development of Photon was halted due to lack of financial support and the growing need to redirect development efforts toward other required documentation systems and technologies.
Since then, I have periodically received numerous emails from potential users, researchers, and academic and scientific institutions interested in the Photon program, particularly in testing its functionality for implementation in their digital photographic archives and collections. For this reason, it is hereby announced that a presentation and demonstration of Photon will be held at Universidade Nova de Lisboa on Thursday, May 7, 2015, featuring various activities, as well as a Prezi presentation that I am sharing with all followers of mblazquez.es.
Presentation 1. Analysis of photographs using the Photon management program
Finally, I would like to thank everyone for their support of the projects I develop, and I would like to issue a call for collaboration and support of this research, which may result in an application tool of great interest to Documentation.