The report summarizes a 3-year effort in the describing and abstracting of pictorial structures. The overall theme of the research is the determination of how a description of an image can be prepared which is suitable for answering questions for an unspecified future use. The framework of the study is first described, and then the following three areas of investigation are discussed: investigation of the various types of pictorial description; investigation of the manner in which people create and use descriptions of image data, and the characteristics of these descriptions; and investigation of how to represent pictorial description, and how to combine different descriptions of the same picture to obtain an 'encyclopedic entry' for the picture.