Strangeness Production by Electromagnetic and Hadronic Probes

After pioneering works on hypernuclei, strangeness production mechanisms have been studied in hadron collisions and photoreactions in the sixties. Recent experiments at SATURNE and COSY, in the hadronic sector, as well as ELSA and JLab, in the electromagnetic sector, have confirmed our basic ideas on the reaction mechanisms. In the near future, strangeness production at JLab, HERMES and COMPASS may prove to be a powerful tool to study hadronic matter.