Creative Commons plans to maintain a database of metadata for every work licensed or dedicated to the public domain with the Creative Commons Contributor Application. We will make that metadata available and searchable using a variety of human-and machine-readable interfaces. Our goal is to help potential users easily search for and identify public domain and custom-licensed works.

From the Creative Commons database, we will be able to generate a variety of data and metadata formats including RDF metadata and application-specific XML vocabularies. This data and metadata will be made available for use by third-party software applications.

Interoperability with third-party applications and distributed networks is one of our major goals, and we will provide numerous APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to enable software programs to access and process Creative Commons metadata quickly and easily. We plan to export our data using XML and RDF over HTTP and other protocols.

Creative Commons is collaborating with a number of companies and organizations on the potential uses of licensing metadata within a variety of content delivery and application systems.