Open Images creative recycling

August 15th 2008

Within the scope of Images for the Future, Sound and Vision and Knowledgeland are developing a new project called Open Images. The project’s goal is to give online access to a selection of archive material and to subsequently encourage creative recycling of this material.

An example of such recycling is the ‘remixing’ of archive images in new videos. Open images also makes it possible to create links to other sources of information (such as Wikipedia), which facilitates the development of ‘mashups’ by third parties. Access to the material is based upon the Creative Commons license model in which not al the rights (as is the case within the traditional copyright) but only a few rights of choice are reserved.

This open ‘approach’ is also carried out in the underlying technology by using open formats and open source software. Furthermore, all the software that is being developed for Open Images will also be made available as open source software.

Open Images will be launched as a beta-version at the end of this year. A brain storm session that took place at Knowledgeland this month marked the beginning of the development of the project. The objective of this meeting was to map out the current (open source) solutions in the field of digital video. The digital video experts of the following parties were invited: Bits on the Run, Pad.ma, Tribler and SURFmedia.