%0 Journal Article %F dvmmPub125 %A Chang, Shih-Fu %A Smith, John R. and Mandis Beigi %A Benitez, Ana B. %T Visual Information Retrieval from Large Distributed On-line Repositories %J Communications of the ACM %V 40 %N 12 %P 63-71 %X Based on our experience in developing visual information retrieval system (VIRS) in the Web-based environment, we present our views of the present and future of VIRS, particularly those providing access to large distributed on-line repositories. We will discuss the role of content-based visual query, present a taxonomy for classifying existing VIRS, present a working Internet VIRS as a case study, describe a preliminary prototype of Internet meta VIRS, and finally make some bold conjectures about the dominant challenging in developing scalable VIRS for the future Internet environment %U http://www.ee.columbia.edu/dvmm/publications/97/CACMdec97_ana.pdf %8 December %D 1997