ECHOES

ECHOES (European Cloud for Heritage OpEn Science) is 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’ 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.

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.