ISCC — International Standard Content Code¶

Open, decentralized content identification — derived from the content itself¶

ISCC (ISO 24138:2024) is an open standard for content identification that works directly from the digital file. Generate a compact, similarity-preserving code for any text, image, audio, or video. Anyone can derive the same ISCC-CODE from the same content, with no registry and no assignment step.

Learn how it works Try it live

Open source · ISO 24138:2024 · maintained by the ISCC Foundation

Find your path¶

One code, derived from the bytes themselves¶

Most identifiers (ISBN, ISRC, DOI) are assigned by an authority and attached to a work. The ISCC inverts this: anyone can compute the code directly from the digital content using open algorithms. The same content always produces the same code, even after re-encoding or compression, and similar content produces similar codes.

The ISCC complements existing identifiers rather than replacing them. An ISBN identifies an abstract product, such as a specific edition of a publication; an ISCC is computed from a file and tells you whether two files are the same content, and how similar they are. Read more in the Concept →

How it works¶

An ISCC-CODE is a composite, hierarchically structured fingerprint. It combines several content-derived ISCC-UNITs covering embedded metadata, normalized content, and the raw bytes. Each unit is a compact, similarity-preserving hash.

See the full specification →

Try it¶

• Web demo: https://demo.iscc.io
• Playground: https://huggingface.co/spaces/iscc/iscc-playground

Developer entry points¶

• iscc-core — Python reference implementation of the ISO 24138 core algorithms
• iscc-sdk — high-level Python toolkit for generating ISCCs from media files

See the Resources page for the wider ISCC ecosystem of tools and services.