Jonas has already mentioned it but if you are looking for way to automate a batch process for creating assets for DeepZoom then Giorgio has the answer:
http://blogs.msdn.com/giorgio/archive/2008/05/05/deep-zoom-batch-export-programmaticly-using-c.aspx
My little tip is how to get this to work in Vista 64bit, Giorgio has already built in a little prompt so you can point to the location of "SparseImageTool.exe", in 64bit it will be in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Deep Zoom Composer" or similar.
I found that I needed to put some quotes around the paths supplied as args to the tool. I had to change one simple line of code, line 118 of DeepZoomBatchHelper.cs:
string args = string.Format("CreateCollection \"{0}\" \"{1}\"",
And all worked well. Great work Giorgio! Now to enhance this a little bit to link to the source database of image metadata. Another day...