Due to the growing number of digital audiovisual media during the last years, the amount of metadata to describe the content increased significantly. In order to improve the search and retrieve of such data, the metadata standard MPEG-7 has been established. This international standard facilitates many application domains and is probably the richest multimedia metadata set available today. However, it does not yet exist a common query format, which communicates between client and databases and which supports cross- modal and cross-medial retrieval. Therefore the MPEG committee decided to contribute to this issue. This paper describes the current status of the standardization effort and shows the already implemented technology more in detail. Furthermore, examples are described in order to highlight the concept of the proposed query language.
