ISCC - International Standard Content Code¶

Open source content identification¶

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

Learn how it works Try it live

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

Find your path¶

New to the ISCC? Start with the introduction on iscc.io.

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://web.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.