Open Culture Data

Open Culture Data is a network of cultural professionals, software developers, designers, copyright specialists and open data experts, that opens data from the cultural heritage sector and encourages the development of valuable cultural applications. This makes culture accessible in new ways to a broader public.

Cultural institutions increasingly make information digitally available. As a result, new possibilities come up and surprising applications using this information are developed. This enables the public to interact with art and culture in new ways. The data, however, is often poorly accessible. End users face technical problems while accessing the data, and are confronted with legal boundaries in the reuse of information.

Open Culture Data aims to support the cultural sector in the process of making cultural data available. We do this by:

• encouraging to make accessible larger sets of open cultural data.
• collecting and disclosing open cultural data via an open digital infrastructure (API).
• sharing our experience and knowledge about making cultural data publicly and digitally available.
• stimulating to develop new applications using open cultural data.

Open Culture Data is a combined initiative of Kennisland, Open State Foundation and the Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision. In 2012, the project was funded by the Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision and Creative Commons Netherlands. The project Open Culture Data Challenge that took place in 2014 was funded by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Sciences.

Activities 2012:

• The first edition of the masterclass Open Culture Data.
• The Open Culture Data Competition. The elected winner of this challenge was the MUSE, an online app in which users combine different aspects from renowned cultural works to create a new piece.
• Hackathons and workshops.
• Several networking activities.

Activities 2014:

• The second edition of the masterclass Open Culture Data.
• The Open Culture Data Challenge. The elected winner was Tag-Art, a platform that allows users to enrich the information available in the Open Culture Data API and to embed this information in a variety of applications.
• The Open Culture Data-API was developed. For more information click here.
• Impact assessment.
• Several networking activities.

Activities in 2015:

• Open Cultuur Data Reader (Dutch only)
• Masterclass Open Cultuur Data Noord-Holland (Dutch only)

Activities in 2016:

• Open Cultuur Data Lab
• Open Data Reader 2016 (Dutch only)

More information about Open Culture Data’s network and its variety of activities is available on the website.

• KL'ers involved
• Lisette Kalshoven lk@kl.nl
• Maarten Zeinstra mz@kl.nl