Content-based audiovisual data retrieval utilizing new emerging related standards such as MPEG-7 will yield ineffective results, unless major focus is given to the semantic information level. Mapping of low level, sub-symbolic descriptors of a/v archives to high level symbolic ones is in general difficult, even impossible with the current state of technology. It can, however, be tackled when dealing with specific application domains. It seems that the extraction of semantic information from a/v and text related data is tractable taking into account the nature of useful queries that users may issue and the context determined by user profile. The IST project FAETHON is developing a novel platform to implement these ideas for user friendly and highly informative access to distributed audiovisual archives.