A method and system for description of synthetic audiovisual content makes it easier for humans, software components or devices to identify, manage, categorize, search, browse and retrieve such content. For instance, a user may wish to search for specific synthetic audiovisual objects in digital libraries, Internet web sites or broadcast media; such a search is enabled by the invention. Key characteristics of synthetic audiovisual content itself such as the underlying 2d or 3d models and parameters for animation of these models are used to describe it. More precisely, to represent features of synthetic audiovisual content, depending on the description scheme to be used, a number of descriptors are selected and assigned values. The description scheme instantiated with descriptor values is used to generate the description, which is then stored for actual use during query/search. Typically, a user, to search for a needed synthetic audiovisual content initiates a query that is passed on to a search engine that then retrieves the candidate content from one or more databases whose description closely matches the query criteria specified by the user.