ISO/IEC TR 15938-11:2005

Overview - ISO/IEC TR 15938-11:2005 (MPEG-7 profile schemas)

ISO/IEC TR 15938-11:2005 is a Technical Report that provides the actual XML Schema (XSD) implementations for the MPEG-7 profile definitions specified in ISO/IEC 15938‑9. Commonly called the MPEG-7 profile schemas, this document packages machine-readable schema artifacts for three standard description profiles:

• Simple Metadata Profile (SMP) - lightweight metadata tagging for single multimedia clips (suitable for music, images, mobile apps).
• User Description Profile (UDP) - describes user preferences and usage patterns to enable personalization, recommendation and content discovery.
• Core Description Profile (CDP) - a core set of tools to describe images, audio, video and mixed-media collections for broad applications (broadcast, distribution, educational content).

The report is informative and supplies the concrete XSDs that developers and implementers can adopt for interoperable multimedia metadata.

Key Topics and Technical Requirements

• Provides XSD schema files implementing profile elements and datatypes defined in MPEG‑7 profiles.
• Defines profile constructs such as Mpeg7Type, DescriptionProfileType, timePointType, TextAnnotationType, TermUseType, MediaAgentType, and ControlledTermUseType (examples visible in the schema extract).
• Includes patterns and basic datatypes for time points and textual annotations (XML Schema patterns for time formats are specified).
• Integrates with the MPEG‑7 Description Definition Language (DDL) extensions and references ISO/IEC 15938 parts (notably Part 9 - Profiles and Levels, and Part 5 - Multimedia Description Schemes).
• Delivered as an informative TR (type 3) with licensing and implementation notes for MPEG‑7 conformance.

Practical Applications and Who Uses It

• Metadata architects and multimedia platform developers use the XSDs to validate and produce MPEG‑7 compliant metadata documents.
• Content providers, broadcasters, digital asset managers, and educational content creators employ the CDP for consistent description across images, audio and video.
• Mobile app developers, image/music tagging services, and metadata-heavy search engines adopt the SMP for lightweight tagging.
• Recommendation engines, personalization systems, and user profiling tools leverage the UDP to model user preferences and usage history for discovery and filtering.
• Useful for interoperability in content exchange, cataloging, search, rights management and automated content processing pipelines.

Related Standards

• ISO/IEC 15938 series (MPEG‑7): Parts 1–10 (Systems, DDL, Visual, Audio, MDS, Reference software, Conformance, Extraction & use, Profiles & levels, Schema definition).
• Normative reference: ISO/IEC 15938‑9 (Profiles and levels).

Keywords: MPEG-7, ISO/IEC TR 15938-11:2005, profile schemas, XSD, SMP, UDP, CDP, multimedia metadata, XML Schema, description profiles, personalization, content discovery.