Picture Floods.

There's a flood of pictures in our lives, and everybody who likes to wield a digital camera will know how long it takes to sort and tag all the photos. Plus there's a growing amount of digitised historical pictures - statues, paintings, manuscript pages - that are available on the internet or on CDs and DVDs. And these are best and easiest to use if they are properly tagged so you can look for, say, a distaff. Or a donkey. Or whatever.

And IT people are actually working on this - they are working on image recognition software that will be able to recognise, say, a crown. Or a distaff. Or a donkey. or whatever, and all that on historical source material that has been digitised.

There's a full article (in German) about that over on Spiegel, in case you are interested.