Towards an MPEG-7 Query Language

Due to the growing amount of digital media an increasing need to automatically categorize media such as music or pictures has been emerged. One of the metadata standards that has been established to search and retrieve media is MPEG-7. But it does not yet exist a query format that enables the user to query multimedia metadata databases. Therefore the MPEG committee decided to instantiate a call for proposal (N8220) for an MPEG-7 query format (MP7QF) framework and specified a set of requirements (N8219). This paper introduces a MP7QF framework and describes its main components and associated MP7QF XML schema types. The framework makes use of the MPEG-21 digital item declaration language (DIDL) for exchanging MP7QF Items along various MP7QF frameworks and client applications. An MP7QF Item acts as container for the input query format and output query format of a user query request. This paper concentrates on components of the framework such as session management, service retrieval and its usability and excludes consciously definitions and explanations of the input and output query format.