Research project - Echoes

European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH)

The project

The ECCCH 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, creating a unified environment that supports the digital transformation of both tangible and intangible assets, enabling interaction, manipulation, and enrichment of digital counterparts with the goal of creating a semantically rich and collectively produced "heritage of tomorrow".

ECHOES stands out for promoting a holistic approach to the digital transformation of cultural heritage, going beyond mere digitization and fostering new scientific knowledge through collaborative tools. The project aligns with other European initiatives to avoid duplication and is supported by a heterogeneous consortium representing over 1.000 organizations across Europe.

By integrating the results of European and national projects and maintaining an inclusive and sustainable legal entity, ECHOES aims to create a solid pan-European network of stakeholders, ensuring continuous collaboration and innovation in the preservation and accessibility of cultural heritage.

Project’s Activities

The ECHOES project is structured around four main pillars: Community, Knowledge, Innovation, and Sustainability, with an additional cross-cutting pillar.

The Community pillar focuses on building and organizing the ECCCH community, providing training for the adoption of Digital Commons, or common digital assets. The Knowledge pillar develops the cloud infrastructure for system hosting and organizes knowledge to ensure the digital continuum of managed resources. The Innovation pillar creates vertical applications and ensures the health of the ecosystem through continuous assessment. The Sustainability pillar ensures the long-term sustainability of the cloud. The cross-cutting pillar addresses management, communication, and integration among the various projects.

For more information, visit the ECHOES website.

The role of TALIA in ECHOES

Talia participates in the ECHOES project actively in the creation of tools for metadata enrichment and validation, leveraging NLP (Natural Language Processing) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies to ensure high-quality, accurate and interoperable metadata across the entire platform. Talia will apply artificial intelligence algorithms and semantic analysis and automatic annotation tools for cultural heritage, thus offering technological tools that will be integrated into the project's cloud infrastructure.

Contact ECHOES

The European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage – Info Day 2024 highlights the launch event of the Horizon Results Booster, a service designed to maximize the impact of research projects funded by Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe. The event included a workshop session aimed at improving dissemination and valorization strategies, promoting synergies among projects, and providing tailored support.

For more information and to participate in the ECCCH, visit the Horizon Results Booster Event website.

Solutions

The ECHOES project offers several key solutions to enhance the preservation and accessibility of cultural heritage:

• Data Integration: Enables the aggregation of data from multiple GLAM sources—Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums—to build and connect cultural knowledge.
• Ontology Development: Generates formal descriptions and representations of knowledge within specific domains for structured data management.
• Advanced NLP Tools: Leverage Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to enrich the descriptive metadata of resources, link content entities, and perform semantic analysis of their meanings.
• Collaborative Platforms: Facilitate interaction, manipulation, and enrichment of the digital counterparts of cultural heritage resources.
• Sustainable Digital Ecosystem: Ensures long-term persistence and continuous improvement of digital heritage resources.

For more information, visit the ECHOES website.

Partners

The ECHOES project brings together a heterogeneous consortium of 15 EU member states and pan-European networks.

Key partners include:

• The French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)
• Université de Tours, CY Cergy Paris University (CYU)
• The National Research Council (CNR)
• The Europeana Foundation
• The Italian Institute of Technology (IIT)
• Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC)
• FORTH
• The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, KU Leuven
• The University of Sheffield
• Riksarkivet
• Athena RC
• Aalto University
• ETT
• M.E.T.A. Srl
• Talia
• National Archives of Hungary
• University of St Andrews

Here are the profiles of the 50 partners.

For more information, please visit ECHOES website.