A European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage – Innovative tools for documenting, interlinking and organising data

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 creating, enriching and refining annotated bibliographies linked to digital cultural heritage objects^[2].
• The ECCCH is widely used by European cultural heritage professionals and researchers for documenting the results of fieldwork such as archaeological or paleontological excavations and studies.
• 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 documenting, interlinking and organising data. Concrete applications of these tools and methods should be provided for at least the following uses:

• Creating, enriching and refining annotated bibliographies
• Documenting the results of fieldwork such as archaeological or paleontological excavations or other collection processes and studies

Creating, enriching and refining annotated bibliographies

A crucial task in both education and professional duties within cultural heritage is compiling bibliographies. This time-consuming activity entails gathering relevant literature on a cultural heritage object, entering bibliographic references in a list, assessing each document, and producing notes that are subsequently saved in the bibliography. This work has a value of its own, not only as part of the papers or reports created. Bibliographies therefore ought to be kept on the ECCCH, made accessible, and further enriched, refined and extended by collaborative and supervised efforts.

For this use, projects funded under this topic should make sure that the ECCCH offers tools that automate much of the tedious tasks, and support cooperative work and re-use. Existing tools and bibliographic frameworks should be evaluated and when appropriate built upon. The tools to be developed should offer significant added value to its users beyond what is currently available, and should be developed based on the data model of the ECCCH, gathering data from and incorporating data in the ECCCH. These tools may, to the extent feasible, include functionality to parse and enrich data from for instance retrodigitised sources not readily machine readable. Given a topic or a specific heritage object and/or a small initial set of papers selected by the user, enhanced AI technologies working on text or/and on images should be able to retrieve related works, evaluate the fit of a given paper with the subject of the research, and produce a preliminary bibliography. The authoring system should support the creation, editing, and annotation of bibliographies. It should be possible to define with whom the results are shared (e.g. with a restricted group of professionals or with all users).

Documenting the results of fieldwork such as archaeological or paleontological excavations or other collection processes and studies

Fieldwork such as archaeological or paleontological exploration and research typically produce large amounts of different kinds of data, such as survey documentation and documents presenting, narrating and interpreting the findings, photographic data, 3D models, drawings, maps and geographic information system data. At a later stage, most of the findings become assets for cultural heritage institutions such as museums. Such activities (excavation, study, etc.), thus, are a crucial phase of the musealisation process. Moreover, most countries enforce legal obligations regarding the archiving of data produced by excavations, as well as periodic reports.

For this use, projects funded under this topic should offer a set of tools that makes the ECCCH a valuable resource for the community involved in such excavations and studies, using an extensible data model based on semantic technology, as well as a repository for the produced data, together with appropriate data visualisation and analysis instruments. Regulated reporting and archiving obligations in different countries should be analysed, and to the extent possible semi-automatised.

Ontologies and vocabularies should be extended as needed to define the data structures and relationships between different data, in view of achieving interoperability. Repositories from different institutions and countries should be inter-operable and inter-connected. The semantic information layer should make it possible for AI technologies to access and "learn" from the archive. An extension to the ECCCH 3D browser should provide an interactive and visual interface to excavation data, and to the related findings.

Also, citation capabilities should be integrated, to facilitate publication, sharing and reuse of data. Authoring tools should provide a way for the user to build "narratives"^[3] starting from the archival data.

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.

In particular, in order to exploit potential synergies, proposals may consider, where appropriate, to build on the work of the projects funded under the topics HORIZON-INFRA-2021-EOSC-01-04 and HORIZON-INFRA-2023-EOSC-01-03, especially concerning Science Knowledge Graphs (SKGs) as flexible tools to monitor and track events of science linked to provenance, publishing, citation, data processing, data and software usage, as well as service consumption.^[4]

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]"Narratives" in this context means all documents that use, as their building blocks, the data entities contained in the archive, such as periodic reports, formulation of new interpretations or confutation/discussion of the already existing ones, preparation of scientific papers and publications, set-up of teaching/didactic material, schemes and graphs.

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