Searching amongst all artworks ever made for some common item, such as finding all the trees ever depicted in art, might return such a scale of results that it would be hard to know where to start with them. Much as someone may like looking at tree pictures, do they want to look though millions of them to find the perfect one ?
Now that we have the ability to search amongst all artworks ever created (see Overview), these overwhelming quantity of search results seems more than likely. However there are a few issues that would also have to have been resolved to ensure we really are getting all 267 millions depictions of trees in art:
- All the artworks would need to have been catalogued with some level of description of the artwork (either visual description containing mention of trees or some other conceptual description that identifies this non-obviously tree drawing as still depicting in some way trees (for example an abstract artwork intended to represent a tree)).
- All the visual depictions identified in the image of the object are recorded, every smallest element (the little dog in the corner) that play no role in the overall painting (and hence might not be recorded otherwise in a catalogue entry) is also noted to be found
So now we know we really will find all the Trees depicted, however small a part they play in a painting (even the tiniest tree in a painting will now be found). Returning all 267 million of them would therefore need some sorting between really obvious trees:
[example of well known tree painting]
and those artworks which just qualify:
Almost a new sort order which could be called the “platonic gap” – the distance between the picture in the head of the searcher of the tree (or any other concept) and the depictions in the artworks. As with all search results we want it just to work. Learning from how billions of web pages have been turned into meaningful results:
- Page Rank
- Personalised Results
Leave a Reply