The biggest coup so far for San Mateo, California-based Virage Inc appears to have been to persuade Illustra Information Technologies Inc to include its Visual Information Retrieval engine in its DataBlade. But now the image retrieval software specialist has landed the big one. Oracle Corp has agreed to incorporate Virage’s Visual Information Retrieval engine as a data cartridge that plugs into Oracle Universal Server. The data cartridge will enable users to search for images based on their visual content, including color, texture, composition and shape, so you’re not likely to be presented with Madonna when you’re looking for pictures of Kate Moss. Oracle reckons the data cartridge will be just the thing to energize its Network Computing Architecture and enable people to retrieve – or more importantly find – just the image they are looking for from the Web when they know what it looks like but not what it’s called. Oracle reckons that the technology will enable companies to get full value for the millions they spend each year on photography, bit maps, medical, architectural and commercial art. The terms were not disclosed.
