these files are for extracting and manipulating data from the design engineering lab 
repository, previously located at http://function.device.mst.edu and now at
http://designengineeringlab.org:16080/

you can read more about their philosophy etc at 
http://designengineeringlab.org/delabsite/research.html

the repository was a SQL database mainly geared toward representing function structure 
graphs in terms of "flows".

the database (and subsequent XML dump) contained base64 (ascii) encoded jpeg files, so in 
order to view those files we have to decode them, hence these scripts.