In the spotlight: Open Images

Blog

21 October 2013

Evelien Wolda

Open Images, by Sebastiaan ter Burg (director, editor, audio) / Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision (producer), is licensed under Creative Commons – Attribution-Share Alike.

Open Images is an open media platform that offers online access to audiovisual collections to stimulate creative reuse. All the material on Open Images is provided under the Creative Commons licensing model and can be downloaded and reused. Open Images also provides an API, making it easy to use the collection in other applications. Users are also welcome to add their own material to the platform and thus expand the collection.

Open, open, open

The ‘open’ nature of the platform is reflected in every ‘layer’ of the project:

Open source software components (MMBase, FFmpeg, LAMP)
Open video formats (Ogg Theora, WebM)
Open standards (Dublin Core, CC-REL, HTML5)
Open API (OAI-PMH, CC0)
Open content (CC-licenses, PD Mark)

Collections and portals

Open Images now contains more than 3000 videos. A large part of these videos are newsreels from the collection of the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision. But there are also several collections from other providers on Open Images. Some of these collections have their own portal in Open Images and can also be found in the API as a seperate set. There is for instance a collection of Dutch performing arts videos initiated by the Theatre Studies department of the University of Amsterdam. There is also an EUscreen[http://euscreen.openimages.eu/] portal containing videos from European broadcasters and audiovisual archives participating in the EUscreen project.

Reuse and impact

Since the launch of Open Images in 2009 the content has been reused for different purposes. Parts of the collection on Open Images have been duplicated to other media repositories, such as Wikimedia Commons and Europeana. A recent look into the reuse on Wikipedia showed that the videos are used to provide visual images to more than 1,600 entries, not only on the Dutch Wikipedia, but also on more than 60 other language version of Wikipedia. These entries are viewed more than 2,5 million times a month.

The data and videos from Open Images are also a great source for innovative applications. Creative developers have become even more aware of the existence of Open Images as a basis for new apps since the Open Culture Data initiative started in 2011. For instance the award winning mobile app Vistory, the award winning timeline application Tijdbalk.nl and the interactive game Led it up. The videos on Open Images were also used for remixing workshops and competitions, such as Celluloid Remix.