A European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage – Innovative tools for advanced data enrichment

ExpectedOutcome:

Projects should contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• The European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) is widely used by European cultural heritage professionals and researchers^[1] for metadata enrichment of digital cultural heritage objects^[2].
• Scientific and professional value as well as intellectual property and other associated rights are effectively embedded in the digital objects of the ECCCH throughout the digital content production chain, thus enabling and boosting cooperation, sharing and re-use.
• European cultural heritage professionals and researchers are aware and make use of new collaboration- and business models based on values and rights embedded in the digital objects throughout the multi-actor value chain.
• European cultural heritage professionals and researchers are provided with clear information as well as targeted training modules on the innovative tools and methods developed.

Scope:

This topic aims at developing and implementing a set of innovative tools and methods on the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) for advanced data enrichment. Concrete applications of these tools and methods should be provided for at least the following uses:

• Metadata enrichment
• Embedding scientific and professional value as well as IP and other associated rights throughout the digital content production chain
• Collaboration- and business models based on the multi-actor value chain

Metadata enrichment

The last decades have seen a growing mass of uninterpreted or misinterpreted data related to cultural heritage assets. Innovative methods are needed to achieve a massive production of semantically enriched digital resources in the context of multidisciplinary research and professional activities.

To make cultural heritage content findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR), and facilitate discoverability, digital objects must be tagged with good quality metadata. This raises several issues that need to be considered in the design and use of the ECCCH, such as metadata models for different application domains, vocabularies and ontological structures, multilingualism, efficient interfaces for accessing and managing metadata and paradata, effective implementation and reuse of existing models for heterogeneous applications, as well as sustainable maintenance of metadata as the real world and its conceptualisations evolve over time.

For this use, projects funded under this topic should develop and test innovative tools for human-driven acquisition, categorisation and annotation of digital objects (e.g. texts, images, 3D models, sounds or videos) combined with new AI-based approaches, resulting in high-quality content and metadata. Methods building on citizen science like approaches may also be considered. The tools should foster the emergence of new collaborative data curation scenarios within a multidisciplinary and multisectoral framework. They should further support innovative data interlinkage between cultural heritage objects and related actors, enabling a semi-automatic mutual enrichment process where data are completed and enhanced by detecting and integrating related sources of knowledge.

Embedding scientific and professional value as well as IP and other associated rights throughout the digital content production chain

With the digital transformation of the cultural heritage area, large amounts of digital resources are emerging. However, a considerable part of this data remains inaccessible in private repositories.

The ECCCH should support the transition from massive production of raw data related to activities on cultural heritage objects, to semantically rich and collectively produced digital resources (digital commons). In this context, a key to encourage data sharing is the adequate control of who may use the material created and/or curated, and of how it will be used.

For this use, projects funded under this topic should develop innovative tools and methods to turn the massive digitisation effort into an opportunity to record and share not only the digital resources (with basic metadata), but also the methods and processes that led to their creation (such as human skills, technological and cognitive processes, or scientific protocols). The tools should support cultural heritage researchers and professionals to record the key steps of their activities on cultural heritage objects, ranging from the historical knowledge to the conservation, restoration and dissemination areas. The tools should produce data chains able to represent the complex workflows - often composed of combinations of individual skills and collective decisions - that constitute the creation of digital resources, as well as their progressive enrichment, transformation and re-use. This information should be linked to any data type/data element. The data chains should also embed information for managing ownership and property rights, use rights, and effective re-use of digital resources, in order to enable and encourage contribution to and use of shared repositories. These tools should, to the extent appropriate, be able to deal correctly with the different cases of unclear or contested IPR that may be encountered. The full production and enrichment chain of digital resources should be encoded, as an implicit mechanism to unveil the value chains of multi-actor collaborative productions. Block chains or other methods may be used, able to encode a stream of changes, modifications and re-uses of the digital objects.

In order to encode this information, extensions to the ECCCH data model might be needed. If so, these extensions should be designed in cooperation with the ECCCH main consortium.

Collaboration- and business models based on the multi-actor value chain

Such encoded value chains should enable innovative business models in collaboration with for instance cultural and creative industries. For this use, projects funded under this topic should introduce and experiment with collaboration- and business models for the data objects stored in the ECCCH, as well as the required web-based infrastructure to allow commercial collaborations. Such actions should be subject to the explicit authorisation of the owner institutions, and revenues shared with those institutions, based on the IPR information from the data value chains.

Particularly in the context of sharing and re-use of digital cultural resources, the Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage, as well as the European Open Science Cloud, might be valuable resources. Developments under these initiatives should be taken into account, as appropriate, in order to explore potential synergies and ensure complementarity.

With a view to use resources efficiently and go beyond the state of the art, projects funded under this topic should, where appropriate, build on previous existing research, methods and solutions. Proposals should therefore ensure that existing tools and methods and their potential (re-)use are properly examined.

Projects funded under this topic may, as appropriate, exploit and contribute to the European Open Science Cloud cross-domain interoperability framework and build on work by previous large-scale projects like PARTHENOS and SSHOC^[3], as well as on data enrichment tools and activities in the context of the Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage. Furthermore, in order to exploit potential synergies, proposals should consider, when appropriate, to build on the work of the coordination project on the European Open Science Cloud Architecture and Interoperability Framework resulting from topic HORIZON-INFRA-2023-EOSC-01-05. ^[3]

Ease of use for the target users is of paramount importance. Therefore, tools and methods should be developed in close collaboration with actively involved representative target users. Furthermore, tools and methods should be thoroughly tested and verified with a significant number of users before the end of the project. Financial support to third parties may be used to facilitate the engagement with users. The financial support to third parties can only be provided in the form of grants.

In order to facilitate the access for less well-equipped users, the developed software tools should to the extent possible be accessible online without requiring installation nor special or particularly powerful equipment. Also, the developed software tools should to the extent appropriate be designed to allow use and avoid loss of work in situations with unstable or limited connectivity.

Projects funded under this topic should demonstrate the potential of the developed tools and methods through representative case studies, conducted in collaboration with relevant users. These case studies should cover a significant share of the range of cultural heritage objects, materials and issues that the tools and methods intend to address. The results of these case studies should produce information that can serve as models for promoting the re-use of the tools and methods in other contexts and by other users within, and where appropriate beyond, the ECCCH.

Proposals should, furthermore, foresee appropriate resources to provide clear information and elaborate targeted training modules for users of the developed tools and methods.

The tools to be developed should be implemented using the low-level libraries established by the project funded under topic HORIZON-CL2-2023-HERITAGE-ECCCH-01-01. The tools developed should be compliant with the design of the ECCCH, and should be integrated with the ECCCH before the end of the project, together with proper documentation. All software and other related deliverables should be compliant with the data model and the software development guidelines elaborated by the project funded under topic HORIZON-CL2-2023-HERITAGE-ECCCH-01-01. If appropriate these tools should be developed with a view to a wider deployment, including in the Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage, as well as, when appropriate, for reuse via the European Open Science Cloud. Furthermore, content produced by these tools for the ECCCH should be interoperable for sharing, when appropriate, via the Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage and/or the European Open Science Cloud.

Proposals should furthermore make provisions to actively participate in the common activities of the ECCCH initiative. In particular, projects funded under this topic should coordinate technical work with projects funded under other call topics of the ECCCH initiative, and contribute to the activities and objectives of the project funded under the topic HORIZON-CL2-2023-HERITAGE-ECCCH-01-01. Proposals should include a budget for the attendance to regular joint coordination meetings, and may consider covering the costs of any other joint activities without the prerequisite to detail concrete joint activities at this stage.

Projects funded under this topic should moreover set up their project websites under the common ECCCH website, managed by the project funded under topic HORIZON-CL2-2023-HERITAGE-ECCCH-01-01.

Furthermore, the Commission expects projects funded under this topic to establish regular coordination mechanisms in order to ensure synchronised planning as well as synergy and/or complementarity of deliverables and outcomes.

The Commission recommends considering reporting periods of 12 months when elaborating proposals.

Please also refer to the Destination introduction text to consider some key characteristics of the vision for the ECCCH.

[1]‘Cultural heritage professionals and researchers’ should in the context of the ECCCH be interpreted as including all different professions and disciplines involved in the cultural heritage field, such as curators, conservators, researchers, art managers, educators, etc., that may develop their activities for instance at cultural heritage institutions, research organisations, higher education establishments or in the cultural and creative industries.

[2]‘Cultural heritage objects’ should in the context of the ECCCH be interpreted as including any form of cultural heritage that can be represented in a digital format: tangible, intangible, born digital; movable objects, buildings, documents, inscriptions, etc.

[3]This by no means imply that partners from such projects need to be part of the consortium.

[4]This by no means imply that partners from such projects need to be part of the consortium.