As the amount of available multimedia documents is increasing, it is becoming harder to access and manage such files according to what they represent. Since the well-known text-based search engines are not adequate for that task, content modeling is assisting by providing information not about the actual bits that constitute a media file, but about their meaning, in other words the bits about the bits. The COSMOS model successfully integrates low level and high-level semantics into a single framework, and is therefore a complete and operational scheme for describing content related information. The MPEG-7 scheme standardizes content modeling and since its introduction in 1999 has now reached a mature state. As applications to create MPEG-7 content are scarce, the COSMOS model can now not only be used to create multimedia content but also act as an application for creating MPEG-7 compliant output.
KeywordsContent modeling and querying, Cosmos-7, MPEG-7.