Abstract We address the problem of indexing broadcast audiovisual documents (such as films, news). Starting from a collection of so-called shots, we aim at building automatically high level descriptions of subsets of this collection, that can be used for annotating, indexing and accessing the document. We propose to represent documents and high level descriptions with the framework of description logics, enriched with temporal relations. We first define the problem as a classification problem. We then propose an algorithm to automatically classify sub-sequences of shots, based on a bottom-up construction of descriptions using the rule mechanism of the CLASSIC system.