ln recent years, the amount of Internet accessible digital audiovisual media files has vastly increased. Therefore the need to describe the media (by way of metadata) has also increased significantly. MPEG-7 (finalized in 2001) provides a comprehensive and rich metadata standard for the descr iption of multimedia content. Unfortunately, a standardized query format does not exist for MPEG-7, or other multimedia metadata. Such a standard would provide for communications between quer ying clients and databases, suppor ting cross-modal and cross-media retrieval. The ISO/IEC SC29WG11 committee decided therefore to contribute to this application space by adding such functionality as a new par t of the MPEG-7 series of standards. In response to a Call for Proposals, six proposals were submitted. This paper describes the strengths of each proposal as well as the resulting draft standard for the MPEG-7 query format