As you might know each Pixel of a digitized Image normally is represented by three color-values known as RGB. RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue, the three base colors of the additive color space used by computers. With these three colors it is possible to mix any color within this colorspace. Each of these colors is represented by an integer number with
a range of 0-255. That means, it is possible to use 256 different brightnesses for each of these colors respectively for the Image. Image-formats based on this RGB range are known as LDRIs, Low Dynamic Ranges Images because they are bound to the 0-255 integer range.
Now, when you take a look at the real world, mother nature isn´t bound to a range when presenting it´s beauty to the human eye. There you have the darkness of a cave with almost no light (at least in the visible spectrum) but also the brightness of an object like the sun which is millions of times brighter than normal daylight, filtered through the atmosphere.
In 1985 Greg Ward invented the RGBE format to be able to work with real world ligthing in his rendering system RADIANCE. The RGBE format basically uses a 4th component known as the shared exponent (E). With the help of this exponent it was possible to describe the actuall brightness of a pixel in a real world brightness range (High Dynamic Range).
In the years after that invention there where developed several different formats to represent the real world brightness information inside of a digital picture. E.g. Bill Reeves of Pixar created a 33-bit long RGB format , Dan McCoy added it in 1996 to his free TIFF library (libtiff). Greg Ward later added the so called LogLuv format to this library which captures 5 orders of magnitude and the full visible gammut in 24 bits using a perceptual color encoding (There is also a 32-bit version f this format which s able to hold up to 38 orders of magnitude and often results in smaller files due to run-length encoding).
The HDR format of the pictures in this database uses the RGBE format explained above.