Scholars and students of independent film-making can now access a downloadable library of almost 3,000 independently made films. Following today’s launch of the IndiePix website.

The new online independent film-resource, highlights related material to each film in its database and then through a topic’s contextual relationship with the original material. Users can also download or order a disc of the film that would otherwise be unavailable or remain unknown.

At today’s launch event, held at the British Film Institute, Bob Alexander, President of IndiePix said he wanted to, “reorganise the economics of independent film distribution”. Commenting on the experience of using IndiePix he said, “It is important that the site is easy to navigate, and that it can recommend new films, directors and actors that visitors may not have heard of – this is by far the best way to encourage greater participation in the independent film industry.”

In order to manage the contextual relationship between themes in films, the IndiePix site utilises topic mapping technology. The software finds a correlation between a film’s similar themes, various elements and contexts within it and then suggests similar and related works against the originally searched material.

Information with the strongest correlated link gets precedence over similar but less important related data. For example two films with the same director will be related more strongly than a pair of films with the same costume designer.

Collaborating with IndiePix on the venture, software vendors NetworkedPlanet have previously been involved with the arts, having implemented a similar system using topic maps in the Royal Academy of Music.

Like IndiePix, the prestigious institute used NetworkedPlanet’s TMCore topic map engine to connect and categorise 100,000 in-house and related external resources; these ranged from the Academy’s music library, various collections including sound clips, and teaching materials. Content created by students and record company databases was also made available.