The invention provides a
system and method for integrating
multimedia descriptions in a way that allows humans,
software components or devices to easily identify, represent, manage, retrieve, and categorize the
multimedia content. In this manner, a user who may be interested in locating a specific piece of
multimedia content from a
database, Internet, or broadcast media, for example, may search for and find the multimedia content. In this regard, the invention provides a
system and method that receives multimedia content and separates the multimedia content into separate components which are assigned to multimedia categories, such as image, video, audio, synthetic and text. Within each of the multimedia categories, the multimedia content is classified and descriptions of the multimedia content are generated. The descriptions are then formatted, integrated, using a multimedia integration
description scheme, and the multimedia integration description is generated for the multimedia content. The multimedia description is then stored into a
database. As a result, a user may query a
search engine which then retrieves the multimedia content from the
database whose integration description matches the query criteria specified by the user. The
search engine can then provide the user a useful search result based on the multimedia integration description.