and other annotations are absolutely crucial to scientific and medical images,
where the content, unlike that in consumer photographs, cannot be gleaned
from cursory inspection.
One feature that sets apart research microscopy from other kinds of image
management is that the structure of information is not known a priori. Rather,
when the system is used in a discovery process, the process leads to new infor-
mation that needs to be stored in the same system. Predefined annotations and
hierarchies are inadequate for all experiments. This motivates the development
of a specification language for defining new information and an extensible
platform architecture that will be able dynamically to support the new data types.
The second distinct feature in microscopy ...