ECHOES aims to create the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) as a shared platform for heritage professionals and researchers to access data, innovative scientific and training resources and advanced digital tools co-developed by the heritage community according to their specific needs. ECHOES will bring together fragmented communities of the Cultural Heritage (CH) field, which consists of various actors from different sectors and disciplines, into a new community around 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.
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.
ECHOES covers 15 EU member states but also ensures a wider representativeness and inclusivity thanks to several institutions associated to pan-European networks and initiatives. These institutions are active in a wide range of topics as such as language as social and cultural data, art, archaeology, museums, archives, libraries, monuments and sites, conservation-restoration, cultural management, media culture, digital cultural heritage, intangible heritage and more. In this way, all CH sectors are represented in ECHOES. Moreover, several universities, research institutions and companies operating at different scales with complementary skills have been selected to manage the building of the ECCCH platform.
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.
