MD/sup 2/L: content description of multimedia documents for efficient process and search/retrieval

Analogous to the meta-data that composes "data about the data" for library/information collections, there is a growing interest in employment of "bits about the bits" for compressed audio and video documents. The idea is to provide content description, or meta-data, of compressed multimedia documents, so that users could make use of such description to search and retrieve multimedia data/documents as they do with Dublin Core bibliographic information to library collections. An ongoing endeavor undertaken by the Motion Picture Expert Group (MPEG) is to call for a new international standard known as MPEG-7. When it is finalized in 2001, MPEG-7 is expected to provide standardized schemes for concise and unambiguous multimedia content description for different types of multimedia data/documents in a wide range of applications. Such content description should be denoted in the standardized description language, so as to support machine parsing and interoperability. We report our recent work related to MPEG-7. We present the Multimedia Description Definition Language (MD/sup 2/L), which provides a set of formal notations for defining Description Scheme Definition (DSD) for various types of media data such as audio, video, etc. We also discuss our on-going implementation of Java based mechanisms for parsing and indexing/searching MD/sup 2/L description.