Building a Cloud for Cultural Heritage – Mapping stakeholders’ interest

CNRS, the French National Research Center, together with CNR, the Italian National Research Center, and the FSP (Fondation des Sciences du Patrimoine), are currently working on a proposal to respond to the European Commission call (HORIZON-CL2-2023-HERITAGE-ECCCH-01-01) . Our project, called European Cloud for Heritage OpEn Science (ECHOES), aims at creating the core platform for the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), including both tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The design will be driven by the needs of Cultural Heritage (CH) stakeholders (Cultural heritage institutions, curators, conservators, researchers, art managers, educators and other cultural heritage professionals), backed up by a very solid technical consortium. Our goal is to provide an open-source platform supporting multiple media, services for data management, visualization, analysis, enrichment, preservation, and encoding data provenance through the recording of a wide and coherent semantic context. Our ultimate objective is to build a practical infrastructure that can help the work of CH professionals. We will strive to provide tools for building vertical specialized applications that by staying close to the stakeholders actual needs, workflows and practices will provide a significant added value in using the infrastructure.

Those open services and tools will also boost the activities of CH institutions by providing financial support (grants) as well as training for all stakeholders. Aiming at effectively impact cultural/creative industries and EU societies, the platform will be designed as an evolving system, able to incorporate new data and new digital instruments providing valuable assets for further uses and dissemination to the public.

ECHOES will be established as a legal entity with an inclusive and evolving structure of governance that ensures the integration of other partnerships and initiatives. This legal entity will be representative of CH stakeholders.

Consortium

A consortium has been set up to respond to the call for proposals in the best possible conditions by integrating the main players in the field of cultural heritage and the already existing structures, such as ARIADNE-RI AISBL, CLARIN ERIC, DARIAH ERIC, Europeana  Initiative, NEMO, as well as E-RIHS, JPI, and ARCHE.

The project involves many key institutional partners all around the European Union and will imply many stakeholders from different communities.

Objectives of this mapping of interest

This mapping of interest aims at identifying CH stakeholders, Cultural heritage institutions, curators, conservators, researchers, art managers, restorers, educators and other cultural heritage professionals for both tangible and intangible cultural heritage, who may have an interest in benefiting from ECHOES’s tools and services and/or in contributing to it by bringing/sharing their data.

Procedure for the expression of interest

Interested CH stakeholders should send an email to Xavier Rodier and Sarah Daoud  by the 15^th of July 2023. Check the procedure to express your interest.

⇒ Download the full mapping of interest