The IBM alphaWorks development team has released a downloadable MPEG-7 Annotation Tool which "assists in annotating video sequences with MPEG-7 metadata. Each shot in the video sequence can be annotated with static scene descriptions, key object descriptions, event descriptions, and other lexicon sets. The annotated descriptions are associated with each video shot and are put out and stored as MPEG-7 descriptions in an XML file. IBM MPEG-7 Annotation Tool can also open MPEG-7 files in order to display the annotations for the corresponding video sequence. IBM MPEG-7 Annotation Tool also allows customized lexicons to be created, saved, downloaded, and updated. The IBM MPEG-7 Annotation Tool takes an MPEG video sequence as the required input source. The tool also requires a corresponding shot segmentation file, where the video sequence input is segmented into smaller units called video shots by detecting the scene cuts, dissolutions, and fadings. This shot file can be loaded into the tool from other sources or generated when the video input is first opened. After IBM MPEG-7 Annotation Tool performs shot detection on a video, the shot file can be saved in MPEG-7 schema for later use. As an alternative, the shot file can also be generated by the IBM CueVideo Shot Detection Tool Kit."

MPEG-7 is harmonizing with (or has otherwise harmonized with) other standards that have demonstrated success and acceptance in both traditional media and new media businesses, e.g., W3C (XML, XML Schema), IETF (URI, URN, URL), Dublin Core, ISO/ANSI Thesaurus guidelines, SMPTE Metadata Dictionary, TV-Anytime, etc." [From 'Benefits of MPEG-7']

MPEG-7 description:

"MPEG-7 is a standard for describing features of multimedia content. MPEG-7 provides the world's richest set of audio-visual descriptions. These descriptions are based on catalogue (e.g., title, creator, rights), semantic (e.g., the who, what, when, where information about objects and events) and structural (e.g., the colour histogram -- measurement of the amount of colour associated with an image or the timbre of an recorded instrument) features of the AV content and leverages on AV data representation defined by MPEG-1, 2 and 4."

"It is important to note that MPEG-7 addresses many different applications in many different environments, which means that it needs to provide a flexible and extensible framework for describing audio-visual data. Therefore, MPEG-7 will define a multimedia library of methods and tools. It will standardize: (1) A set of descriptors: A descriptor (D) is a representation of a feature that defines the syntax and semantics of the feature representation. (2) A set of description schemes: A description scheme (DS) specifies the structure and semantics of the relationships between its components, which may be both descriptors and description schemes. (3) A language that specifies description schemes, the Description Definition Language (DDL): It also allows for the extension and modification of existing description schemes. MPEG-7 adopted XML Schema Language as the MPEG-7 DDL. However, the DDL requires some specific extensions to XML Schema Language to satisfy all the requirements of MPEG-7. These extensions are currently being discussed through liaison activities between MPEG and W3C, the group standardizing XML..." [From 'Introduction to MPEG-7']