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System design

Technical Overview

The CommonsDB system consists of multiple interacting components categorized into three main parties, along with infrastructure managed by the CommonsDB project:

CommonsDB technical overview (February 2025)

1. Data Suppliers (Green)

Data suppliers are project partners that provide data input to the CommonsDB system. They operate the following key components locally:

  • ISCC Generator: Produces International Standard Content Codes (ISCC) for content identification and tracking.
  • Certificates & Credentials: Utilized for digital signatures, ensuring data integrity, verifying the authenticity of data suppliers, and establishing attribution of claims.
  • Rights Metadata: Contains information on the rights status of the provided content, along with title and catalog metadata.

Data suppliers interact with CommonsDB through the Declaration API, which facilitates the structured submission of their data.

2. Third Parties (Red)

Third Parties can integrate with CommonsDB and utilize various services, such as ISCC Generator which enables third parties to independently generate ISCCs from the content they wish to verify.

  • PD/OL Registry: Allows Third Parties to set up and maintain a node that synchronizes data with the CommonsDB registry.
  • Vector Search: Facilitates similarity-based searches of ISCCs.

Third Parties interact with CommonsDB via Registry Synchronization, ensuring data consistency across systems.

3. End users

End users access CommonsDB through a Public User Interface, which communicates with the system via the Search API. End users can query content, retrieve metadata, and upload content files for search and verification.

4. Infrastructure Hosted by CommonsDB (Purple)

The CommonsDB project provides and maintains the following core infrastructure:

  • Ingestion Engine: Processes and integrates data from data suppliers.
  • Storage: Stores declaration metadata and content-related information.
  • PD/OL Registry: Maintains a registry of public domain (PD) and open-licensed (OL) works, containing all or a subset of declaration metadata.
  • Metadata API: Provides access to stored metadata for third-party integrations.
  • Search API: Enables users and third parties to perform content searches.

5. Infrastructure Provided by Liccium (Yellow)

  • Search Engine (Liccium): Powers search functionality, indexing and retrieving content efficiently.

Process Flow

  1. Data Suppliers submit ISCCs, Rights Metadata, Certificates & Credentials via the Declaration API.
  2. The Ingestion Engine processes and stores the submitted data.
  3. Data is indexed in Liccium (Search Engine), making it searchable.
  4. The Search API enables End users and Third Parties to query the indexed data.
  5. End users interact with the system via the Public User Interface.
  6. Metadata is stored and made accessible to Third Parties through the Metadata API.
  7. Third Parties can synchronize their registries with the PD/OL Registry to maintain alignment.
  8. Third Parties can utilize Vector Search as an internal discovery mechanism for content similarity.

This structure supports a distributed and extensible system for managing and discovering content efficiently.