MPEG-7 in action: end user experiences with COSMOS-7 front end systems

MPEG-7 has become a key standard to multimedia research in searching, filtering and retrieval. Understanding experiences of users when using MPEG-7-based tools is necessary if we are to improve how MPEG-7 metadata is applied in practice. COSMOS-7 enables structured modeling and filtering of MPEG-7-compliant metadata for digital video. We describe two COSMOS-7 front end systems: COSMOSIS, for modeling digital video metadata, and the Filtering Manager, for filtering digital video metadata. We then present an empirical evaluation of these front end systems undertaken with a sample set of end users from a London, UK, theater company. Our results reveal that end users progress through a number of key stages when modeling and filtering video content.