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ISCC - Year 2019 - Status Report#

After being accepted as PWI at the annual ISO meeting in May 2019 the ISCC initiators Sebastian Posth, Kira Lemke and Titusz Pan have set up the ISCC Foundation in the Netherlands to coordinate and manage further development. Throughout the year 2019 activities have focused on promoting adoption and advance the specifications and reference implementations.

Promoting Adoption#

The ISCC Foundation has actively introduced the ISCC in countless conversations and meetings with stakeholders across different sectors of the content and media industries worldwide.

ISCC Development#

ISCC development follows a dynamic and pragmatic approach. Implementation and testing come before specification. We distinguish between the status of the implementation and the specification.

In 2019 we have created a new command-line toolkit that adds support for audio and video identifiers. For the preliminary implementation of the Content-Code Video, we have decided to build upon the MPEG-7 ISO/IEC 15938 Standard. We now have a testable, end-to-end, open-source implementation of the initial proposal.

Interested parties are invited to test the ISCC with the provided command-line tool at https://github.com/iscc/iscc-cli and provide feedback and feature requests at https://github.com/iscc/iscc-cli/issues

Main Implementation#

The current main implementation is an open-source command-line tool that can be used on Windows, Linux and Mac systems by developers and computer savvy persons (see: https://github.com/iscc/iscc-cli). In the latest release it supports:

  • Creation of ISCC codes for text, image, audio, video
  • Content extraction and ISCC code creation directly from local media files
  • Content extraction and ISCC code creation directly from HTTP remote media files
  • Batch creation of ISCC codes for files in local folders (recursive)
  • Pairwise similarity comparison of ISCC Codes

ISCC Web Api Service#

Based on the CLI tool we have also created an open-source web service API for creating ISCC codes that can be installed on-premises.

ISCC Fast API Docs

ISCC Web Demo#

The interactive web demo for technical demonstrations has also been updated to the new API backend. The source code is also available.

ISCC Web Demo

ISCC Statistics#

  • Total Downloads of ISCC Specs & Reference 12.340
  • Total Downloads of ISCC Command Line Tool 13.852
  • Number Registered ISCC Codes on COBLO testnet 568.580

Status of Specification#

The status of the public technical specification (https://iscc.codes/specification/) covers the overall architecture and has detailed specifications including test data for conformance testing for the following ISCC components:

  • Meta-Code
  • Content-Code Text
  • Content-Code Image
  • Content-Code Mixed
  • Data-Code
  • Instance-Code

Interested parties are invited to review and contribute to the specification and provide feedback and feature requests at https://github.com/iscc/iscc-specs/issues.

Roadmap#

Next steps for the main implementation:

  • ISCC Short-ID
  • ISCC Code Indexing and nearest neighbor search
  • ISCC Code Blockchain registration and querying

Next steps for the specification:

  • Specs for Content-Code Audio
  • Specs for Content-Code Video
  • Specs for Short-ID
  • Specs for blockchain registration

We are planning to implement blockchain registration in conformance with the DID system. Currently, Titusz Pan is regularly working on the main implementation and technical specifications. The ISCC Foundation recommends putting more eyes and hands on testing, development, and specification.