Design and implementation factors in image retrieval across a wide area network—A commercial example

Abstract

An assessment is made of the range of design and implementation factors that need to be considered when implementing a client/server based image retrieval system across a wide area network (WAN). The assessment is based on the commercial implementation of a customer facing system to display digital photographs of properties for a large estate agency chain. The digital images are displayed to customers on PC based clients and retrieved across a WAN from a server running a Windows NT hosted Oracle Relational Database Management System. It is shown how key image attributes: size; resolution; colour depth and compression method affect the balance between image quality and data volume/retrieval times for this image retrieval application. The change in business processes involved in retrieving digital images across a WAN is also considered. It is shown that there is additional complexity in processes and an increased hardware specification, in both leading to increased costs on traditional character based applications.