The Image Object Content Architecture

Technical advances to image processing and the availability of the resulting technologies at reasonable cost have helped to promote the use of images in office, engineering, and scientific environments. As evidence of this use, a wide variety of applications and products designed for image processing have been introduced into the market in recent years. In order to encompass different applications and products in a single image processing system and to allow image data to be exchanged and interpreted consistently throughout the system, IBM has introduced the Image Object Content Architecture (IOCA). This paper discusses requirements for the architecture, concepts of the architecture, use of the architecture in the different data stream environments used by image processing systems, and the IOCA function sets that have been defined for interchange within Systems Application Architecture™ environments.