2006–2009 — HyperImage
HyperImage originated as a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the German Grid Initiative. The resulting research software was subsequently released as open source.
Meta-Image and prometheus
In the DFG-funded Meta-Image follow-up project, HyperImage was integrated with the prometheus image archive. The research environment was subsequently used at several German and European universities and research institutions in both research and teaching.
2010s — Research environment and community projects
HyperImage was developed further as an environment for region-based image annotation, semantic linking, corpus organisation, visual comparison and hypermedia publication. Projects ranged from art history and transcultural studies to natural-history research and multimodal analysis.
HyperImage 3
HyperImage 3 was the final development branch of the original software line. It introduced a newer web publication stack and explored the transition from the Java client toward a browser-based research environment. A public beta was released, but the full transition of the historic architecture was not completed within that development line.
2014–2015 — Early Yenda concept
In the Hachiman Digital Handscrolls project and related presentations, HyperImage was already presented together with an early Yenda concept intended to extend the environment toward semantic annotation, web-based workflows and linked data.
Continued scholarly use
HyperImage continued to be used in research projects after the main period of active releases. The CaeMmCom project, for example, selected HyperImage for visual annotation and the modelling of semantic relationships in multimodal Ancient Egyptian material.
2026 — Yenda
The active continuation of the research model is now Yenda. Rather than extending the increasingly difficult-to-maintain legacy technical platform, Yenda reimplements the established HyperImage research environment on a modern browser-native foundation while retaining compatibility with existing HyperImage projects and data structures.
Yenda is currently in beta, with public release planned for the end of 2026.
→ HyperImage → Yenda
→ Visit yenda.eu