Arthub Flanders

Open data

Museums provide their users access to a wealth of cultural heritage objects either by exhibiting them, or by presenting them via digital channels. Many of these cultural objects, their digital copies and parts of the accrued metadata are subject to concerns such as copyright and intellectual property rights, confidentiality, security and privacy. In answer to these concerns, museums will implement a balanced policy governing access to these cultural resources.

The Flemish Art Collection complements these policies with a series of open access and open data initiatives to enhance digital access to knowledge about the cultural heritage collections preserved by the museums.

What does ‘open’ mean?

“Open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose.”

The Flemish Art Collection leverages the Creative Commons licensing framework to govern access to metadata and images published on the Arthub Flanders platform.

• All metadata (with the exceptions listed below) made available via this platform contain no indication of originality and therefore belong to the public domain. You can thus freely use this information. This website publishes this data under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license to make this explicitly clear.
• All texts used on this website were made available under the Creative Commons license CC-BY or CC-BY-NC. With each text you will find the indication of the governing copyright status.

CC-BY means that the text can be re-used with a mention of the name of the author (if available) and the source (Arthub Flanders, Publisher Flemish Art Collection vzw, date).

CC-BY-NC means that you can re-use the text under the same condition as with CC-BY, but only for non-commercial re-use. Any commercial re-use is forbidden.

Some parts of an object record may contain an element of originality. The values stored in the fields listed in the table below are made available under the CC-BY-NC license.

Format	Fields
HTML	Description
JSON	response.document.description
LIDO XML	lido.descriptiveMetadata.objectIdentificationWrap.objectDescriptionWrap

Layered licensing model

To disseminate metadata and images under the terms established by the Creative Commons licensing framework, the Flemish Art Collection closely cooperates with its museum partners. The guiding principles which govern the process of clearing data, metadata and images for publication under these terms, are consolidated in a decision-making matrix: a Layered Licensing Model.

We refer to the legal notification page for more details.