This is an in-progress prototype for a consolidated "front-door" to the Commons of visual imagery. The project has two near-term goals:

• Seek to understand the requirements for building out a fully-realized "ledger" of all known Commons works across multiple content providers.
• Provide a visually engaging prototype of what that front-door could be for end users seeking to find licensable materials, and to understand how their works have been re-used.

It is not the goal of this project to:

• Produce "web-scale" code or implementations
• Replace or compete with content providers or partners. We seek to make their works more visible, but defer to them for the hard work of generating, promoting, and disseminating content.

Ancillary benefits of this project may include:

• A better understanding of the kinds of tooling we could provide to partners that would allow them (or more often, their users) to integrate Commons-licensed works into a larger whole. For example, APIs provided by Creative Commons that surface CC-licensed images for inclusion in original writing.
• Early surfacing of the challenges inherent in integrating partners' metadata into a coherent whole.
• Research into the feasibility of uniquely fingerprinting visual works across multiple providers to identify and measure re-use -- there will be many technical and privacy challenges here, and we seek to identify those early.

The web application openledger is a simple Python/Flask application which passes through requests to partner APIs. API keys are stored outside of the repo in openledger/instance/config. See openledger/config.example for a snapshot of the current expected values.

This prototype is expected to grow to include works drawn directly from the CommonsDB (see below), as well as direct API links to partners.

This is the backing store for the overall Open Ledger project: our own collection of metadata about known CC (and later, PD) works, collected in partnership with content providers and in methods consistent with their terms of service. (We intend to store only metadata, not actual content assets.)

The CommonsDB would be a point-in-time snapshot of the Commons right now, as we know it. However, it would be possible to roll back to previous snapshots (at least theoretically) using the Ledger, below.

This is the idea of a transactional record of all changes to CC works: items enter the record, changes to metadata are recorded, and new instances of that work appear on known partners. Right now this is purely theoretical.

Run pytest from the root of the project as:

python -m pytest openledger