In this paper we present an initial study on the use of both high and low level MPEG-7 descriptions for video retrieval. A brief survey of current XML indexing techniques shows that an IR-based retrieval method provides a better foundation for retrieval as it satisfies important retrieval criteria such as content ranking and approximate matching. An aggregation technique for XML document retrieval is adapted to an MPEG-7 indexing structure by assigning semantic meanings to various audio/visual features and this is presented here.