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.