The ECHOES project press release was distributed on the 31st July. The press release highlights the objectives and the activities of the project, the consortium and the expected results as follows:
Preserving the Past, Shaping the Future: ECHOES – Your Gateway to a Collaborative and Innovative European Cultural Heritage Community
The European Cloud for Heritage OpEn Science (ECHOES) project aims to establish the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), a shared platform to provide heritage professionals and researchers with access to data, scientific resources, training, and advanced digital tools tailored to suit their needs.
Funded by the European Commission and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), ECHOES will merge fragmented communities of the Cultural Heritage field into a new community.
The ECHOES consortium brings together, for the first time, all the players of the Cultural Heritage and Social and Human Sciences sectors as well as renowned academic and private organisations. It covers 15 EU member states but also ensures a wider representativeness and inclusivity thanks to several institutions associated with pan-European networks and initiatives.
The project will surpass basic digitisation, aiming to spark a transformation in the field through a holistic approach.
ECHOES will integrate existing knowledge about tangible and intangible heritage artefacts, creating a collaborative digital environment for analysing 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 is built on Open Access and Open Science principles, promoting inclusivity and democratising access to knowledge and digital assets for all.
This digital ecosystem will facilitate 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.
