Semantic description in MPEG‐7: The rich recursion of ripeness

Metadata describing multimedia can address a wide variety of purposes, from the purely physical characteristics of an item, to the circumstances surrounding its production, to attributes that cannot necessarily be determined by examining the item itself directly. These latter attributes, often dealing with “meaning” or interpretation of an item's content, are frequently deemed too difficult to determine and subject to individual and cultural variability. At the same time, however, research has shown that these abstract, interpretive attributes, which carry meaning, are frequently the ones for which people search. To describe an item fully, therefore, means to describe it at both the “syntactic” and the “semantic” levels. This article discusses the development of the semantic description schemes within the MPEG‐7 standard from both a historical and an intellectual perspective, as well as the difficulties inherent in creating a descriptive schema that can fully capture the complexity of “narrative worlds.”