Introduction to Open Clip Art Library

This is an abstract for svgopen 2006.

The State of the Open Clip Art Library
Presentation by Jon Phillips

jon@rejon.org, http://www.rejon.org

Software Engineer, Creative Commons

Visiting Faculty, San Francisco Art Institute

The Open Clip Art Library (OCAL) is an on-line community-driven project aiming to create an archive of user contributed clip art based on scalable vector graphics (SVG) that can be freely used. This presentation explains the project as a library, a set of tools used to interface this collection, and as a supportive community — users, artists of varying skill-levels, and "librarians." It concludes with a general discussion of the project's direction including where help is needed for improvement.

The Open Source movement has excelled at production of software. While there have been some astounding examples of Open Source philosophies applied to production of content, such as Wikipedia and Groklaw, the equivalents for open media content are becoming extremely popular. The Open Clip Art Library establishes an Open Source development model for managing a scalable vector graphics library accessible from the web. It is hoped that its success engenders similar efforts geared for other kinds of media such as video, photos, or animation.

There are similar projects that deal with open graphics content like KDE's Klipart, Deviant Art's images and PDphoto's collections of user-submitted photos. The Open Clip Art Library is a combination of the best elements from these projects, such as user submissions, Open Source ideals, and widely publicized submissions. The true novelty however is the interoperability of the library with the W3C SVG 1.1 standard and the use of industry standard Creative Commons metadata which is essentially RDF/XML + Dublin Core + Creative Commons metadata.

A recent development is the decision to begin using the Creative Commons-supported Open Source project, ccHost (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/cchost) which powers the wildly popular ccMixter.org social music remixing community. This engine has scaled the Open Clip Art Library's features to new heights.

This overview examines the goals of the Open Clip Art Library with diverse SVG clip art submissions from the community sprinkled as the backdrop for the production. The talk consists of a dissection of the new Creative Commons' ccHost web-based backend, an overview of the issues regarding filtering of submitted SVG files, a look at how metadata is being used to maximize the repositories effectiveness, and how the Creative Commons Public Domain Declaration is used. In closing, the roadmap of future features, including implementation of web-services and development of software clients to the graphics server are discussed. The Open Clip Art Library provides a service for all levels of graphics users with low social and technical barriers to encourage maximum submissions in order to gather a diverse collection of vector graphics—put your graphics into circulation today at http://www.openclipart.org.

The Open Clip Art Library is hosted by freedesktop.org and is affiliated with the Open Source projects Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org), a cross-platform SVG drawing tool, Sodipodi (http://www.sodipodi.com), Scribus (http://www.scribus.net), a desktop publishing tool, OpenOffice.org, and the Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org).