This International Standard defines a Multimedia Content Description Interface, specifying a series of interfaces

from system to application level to allow disparate systems to interchange information about multimedia content. It

describes the architecture for systems, a language for extensions and specific applications, description tools in the

audio and visual domains, as well as tools that are not specific to audio-visual domains.

This part of ISO/IEC 15938 specifies system level functionalities for the communication of multimedia content

descriptions. ISO/IEC 15938-1 provides a specification which will:

 enable development of ISO/IEC 15938 receiving sub-systems, called ISO/IEC 15938 Terminal, or Terminal in

short, to receive and assemble possibly partitioned and compressed multimedia content descriptions

 provide rules for the preparation of multimedia content descriptions consisting of the tools specified in Parts 3,

4 and 5 of ISO/IEC 15938 for efficient transport and storage.

The decoding process within the ISO/IEC 15938 Terminal is normative. The rules mentioned provide guidance for

the preparation and encoding of multimedia content descriptions without leading to a unique encoded

representation of such descriptions.

This part of the MPEG-7 Standard is intended to be implemented in conjunction with other parts of the standard. In

particular, MPEG-7 Part 1: Systems assumes some knowledge of Part 2: Description Definition Language (DDL) in

its normative syntactic definitions of Descriptors and Description Schemes, as well as in the processing of schema

and descriptions. The methods for obtaining the descriptions to which the encoding techniques in this part refer are

defined in Parts 3, 4, and 5 of ISO/IEC 15938.

MPEG-7 is an extensible standard. The standard method of extending the standard beyond the Description

Schemes provided in the standard is to define new ones in the DDL, and to make those DSs as accessible as the

instantiated descriptions. Further details are available in Part 2.