For the past two years the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG), a working group of ISO/IEC, have been developing MPEG-7 [1], the "Multimedia Content Description Interface", a standard for describing multimedia content. The goal of this standard is to develop a rich set of standardized tools to enable both humans and machines to generate and understand audiovisual descriptions which can be used to enable fast efficient retrieval from digital archives (pull applications) as well as filtering of streamed audiovisual broadcasts on the Internet (push applications). MPEG-7 is intended to describe audiovisual information regardless of storage, coding, display, transmission, medium, or technology. It will address a wide variety of media types including: still pictures, graphics, 3D models, audio, speech, video, and combinations of these (e.g., multimedia presentations).