CSA Preface
Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the Canadian Advisory Committee (CAC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T).
This International Standard was reviewed by the CSA TCIT under the jurisdiction of the Strategic Steering Committee on Information Technology and deemed acceptable for use in Canada. (A committee membership list is available on request from the CSA Project Manager.) From time to time, ISO/IEC may publish addenda, corrigenda, etc. The CSA TCIT will review these documents for approval and publication. For a listing, refer to the CSA Information Products catalogue or CSA Info Update or contact a CSA Sales representative. This Standard has been formally approved, without modification, by the Technical Committee and has been approved as a National Standard of Canada by the Standards Council of Canada.
Scope
1.1 Definition of Scope
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.
As a whole, this International Standard encompassing all of the aforementioned components is known as MPEG-7. MPEG-7 is divided into eight parts (as defined in the Foreword). This part of the MPEG-7 Standard (Part 4: Audio) specifies description tools that pertain to multimedia in the audio domain. See below for further details of application. 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 4: Audio assumes knowledge of Part 2: Description Definition Language (DDL) in its normative syntactic definitions of Descriptors and Description Schemes.
This part of the standard also has dependencies upon clauses in Part 5: Multimedia Description Schemes, namely many of the fundamental Description Schemes that extend the basic type capabilities of the DDL. MPEG-7 is an extensible standard. The method to extend the standard beyond the Description Schemes provided in the standard is to define new ones in the DDL, and to make those DSs available with the instantiated descriptions. Further details are available in Part 2. To avoid duplicate functionality with other parts of the standard, the DDL is the only extension facility provided.
