ECHOES: European Cloud for Heritage OpEn Science

The mission of ECHOES 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.

What sets ECHOES apart is its commitment to a visionary paradigm shift in the CH field: The whole ECHOES consortium, representing all main actors of the European CH community, wants the CH sector to move away from an object-focused approach – where the digitisation of heritage objects is the ultimate goal -, to a holistic approach to digital transformation of both tangible and intangible assets. ECHOES will create a digital environment which will empower users to interact with, manipulate and enrich Digital Twins, leading to new, jointly developed scientific knowledge.

This digital environment will allow the creation of a new generation of heritage objects, the Digital Commons, which are semantically rich and collectively produced – we see this as “the heritage of tomorrow”. At the end of the project, ECHOES will deliver a single platform to integrate results of EU and national projects on CH. The ECCCH will be sustainable thanks to its inclusive legal entity, which will be created before the end of ECHOES.