Grant agreement ID: 101157364
Preserving the Past, Shaping the Future: your Gateway to a Collaborative and Innovative European Cultural Heritage Community
The European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) is a shared platform designed to provide heritage professionals and researchers with access to data, scientific resources, training, and advanced digital tools tailored to suit their needs. This platform is developed by ECHOES (European Cloud for Heritage OpEn Science), a project funded by the European Commission and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) that brings together fragmented communities of the Cultural Heritage field into a new community around the Digital Commons.
ECHOES will create a digital environment that enables the digitisation of existing knowledge and the collaborative analysis of cultural heritage assets, facts, and phenomena. In this context, actors – whether humans or Artificial Intelligence – can develop their interpretations, thereby enriching the knowledge of cultural heritage and their surroundings. The digital environment proposed by ECHOES will empower users to interact with, manipulate and enrich Digital Twins, fostering the creation of new, collaboratively developed scientific knowledge.
The ECCCH built by ECHOES is anchored in the principles of Open Science, which promotes inclusion and democratises access to knowledge and digital assets for all. This digital ecosystem will allow the creation of a new generation of heritage objects, the Digital Commons, which are semantically rich and collectively produced. Upon completion, ECHOES will provide a unified platform to integrate the outcomes of EU and national projects related to Cultural Heritage.
ECHOES’ mission is to set up the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), a shared platform designed to facilitate collaboration among heritage professionals and researchers, enabling them to modernise their workflows and processes. This platform will offer access to data, cutting-edge scientific and training resources, and advanced digital tools, all developed collaboratively by the heritage community to meet their specific requirements. ECHOES will integrate the currently fragmented communities within the Cultural Heritage (CH) sector, bringing together diverse actors from various fields and disciplines into a cohesive community focused on the Digital Commons.
What sets ECHOES apart is its commitment to a visionary paradigm shift in the CH field. The whole ECHOES consortium, representing all main actors of the European CH community, wants the CH sector to move away from an object-focused approach – where the digitisation of heritage objects is the ultimate goal -, to a holistic approach to digital transformation of both tangible and intangible assets. ECHOES will create a digital environment which will empower users to interact with, manipulate and enrich Digital Twins, leading to new, jointly developed scientific knowledge. This digital environment will allow the creation of a new generation of heritage objects, the Digital Commons, which are semantically rich and collectively produced – we see this as “the heritage of tomorrow”. At the end of the project, ECHOES will deliver a single platform to integrate results of EU and national projects on CH. The ECCCH will be sustainable thanks to its inclusive legal entity, which will be created before the end of ECHOES.
A key differentiator of ECHOES is also that it ensures synergies with other European initiatives in order to avoid duplication of efforts: e.g., the common Data Space for Cultural Heritage; EOSC; JPI-CH; CHARTER Alliance, ARCHE etc.
Overall ECHOES’ brings together for the first time all the actors of the CH and Social and Human Sciences sectors as well as renowned academic and private organisations in the field of computer science and data science. The case studies built around each of the Vertical Applications developed in the project is emblematic of such interdisciplinary and collaborative work. This collaboration is moreover ensured at multiple levels thanks to the Cloud’s national nodes.
ECHOES’ main strength is its consortium, which is extremely well placed to represent the wider community, as it includes 15 umbrella organizations representing more than 1000 organisations in Europe, and a variety of disciplines. Ultimately, the project will establish a pan-European network of key stakeholders from CH institutions, including a robust scientific and professional network and will be open to the cooperative efforts of a wide community of users.
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