Open Images: the open-minded media platform

Open Images (www.openimages.eu) is an open media platform that offers online access to audiovisual archive material from various sources to stimulate -creative- reuse. Footage from audiovisual collections can be downloaded and remixed into new works. Users also have the opportunity to add their own material to the Open Images and thus expand the collection. Open Images provides an API (http://www.openimages.eu/api), making it easy for third parties to develop mashups. The platform currently (February 2012) offers access to over 1,800 items from various sources, including a considerable number of newsreels from the collection of Sound and Vision. This amount will continue to grow over the coming years as new items will be uploaded continuously, and as new partners join the initiative.

The items are available under Creative Commons licenses or they are part of the Public Domain. The ‘open’ nature of the platform is further underscored by the use of open video formats (Ogg Theora), open standards (HTML5, OAI-PMH) and open source software components. Furthermore, all software that is developed within the scope of Open Images is released under the GNU General Public License. (http://www.openimages.eu/source). Items published on Open Images and the accompanying descriptions (metadata) are accessible through an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). This enables third parties to retrieve the stored metadata and media files in a structured way.

Open Images actively promotes the use of its dataset, for instance through participation in hackatons and encouraging developers to use it. This has proven very successful so far. For instance, the winner of this years' prestigious Apps for the Netherlands competition, Vistory (http://www.vistory.nl/) used the Open Image dataset.

Furthermore, in cooperation with Wikimedia Netherlands, Open Images continuously contributes audiovisual content to Wikimedia Commons (and is currently responsible for over 12.5% of the video content on Wikimedia Commons). OAI-PMH-based technology has been developed to fully automate the ingestion process from Open Images to Wikimedia Commons. Already, hundreds of items from Open Images have been uploaded and a large proportion of them are used to enrich almost 1,000 textual Wikipedia entries with related audiovisual content. In January 2012, these entries were viewed over 1.8 million times. This shows the potential for the cultural heritage sector to collaborate with the Wikimedia Foundation to reach new and greater audiences within a meaningful context.

These and other examples of the re-use of Open Images material by external parties shows the great possibilities that open data and an open technical infrastructure offer.

1. Open Images home page

2. Media Item Page on Open Images with Creative Commons License Information

3. Example of Audiovisual Enrichment of an Article on Wikipedia

4. Statistics of the Usage and Views of Open Images Media on Wikipedia in January 2012

5. Vistory - example of third-party app made based on the Open Images content