Development of audiovisual content recognition tools will be a task for industries which will build and sell MPEG-7 enabled products. Also for these standards, coding tools were built for research purposes, but they did not become part of the standard itself. In the same way that MPEG will not standardize the tools to generate the description, MPEG-7 will also not standardize the tools that use the description. It might however be necessary to address the interface between the description and the search engine. The words 'descriptions' or 'features' represent a rich concept, that can be related to several levels of abstraction.
Descriptions vary according to the types of data.
Furthermore, different types of descriptions are necessary for different purposes of the categorization. The descriptions that conform to the MPEG-7 standard could be entered by hand, but they could also be automatically extracted. This representation is basic to the process of categorization. In addition, MPEG-7 descriptions could be used to improve the functionalities of previous MPEG standards. In principle, knowledge about the other three MPEG standards is not required for taking part in the MPEG-7 work.