A European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage – Innovative use cases

Europe’s rich cultural heritage and strong creative industries not only reflect our past but also shape our future. It is by building on this foundation and developing our strengths that we can face the great challenges of our time with confidence and shape a desirable common future. Europe's cultural heritage originates from the interaction between people and places through time and is constantly evolving^[1]. Every citizen has a right to engage with the cultural heritage of their choice, while respecting the rights and freedoms of others, as an aspect of the right freely to participate in cultural life^[2].

Europe’s diverse tangible and intangible cultural heritage and dynamic cultural and creative industries (CCIs) are strategic assets. They enrich our lives, foster social cohesion and societal resilience, and contribute to a sense of belonging. They underpin a growing economy that generates more employment than the automotive industry and a similar trade balance as food, drinks and tobacco combined. Many of Europe’s multinational companies build their international success on European heritage and creativity. At the same time, the sector is nurturing large numbers of dynamic small, medium (SMEs) and micro enterprises, creating employment not the least for young people, while deploying their creativity not only to generate income but also to contribute to social and cultural sustainability, wellbeing and to projecting European values at home and abroad. The cultural and creative industries are engines of innovation not only in themselves, but across the entire economy, thus contributing strongly to Europe’s overall competitiveness and future prosperity.

This destination adopts a people-centred perspective and places cultural heritage and the cultural and creative industries at the very heart of the European economy, its competitiveness and sustainability. R&I activities under this destination will support and strengthen European cultural heritage and cultural and creative industries essentially along the following lines:

GREEN: Europe’s cultural heritage and cultural and creative industries engage for carbon neutrality and for adapting to and mitigating the consequences of climate change. European citizens and societies are mobilised for an inclusive, socially and culturally sustainable climate transition.

R&I actions will focus in particular on the establishment of a new European partnership for Resilient Cultural Heritage, supporting cultural heritage institutions to turn the challenges of the climate transition into opportunities, and become drivers of an inclusive societal transition. R&I actions will for instance foment the development of new environmentally friendly technologies and methods to manage, restore and preserve cultural heritage, with a view to making Europe a world leader in sustainable management of cultural heritage. R&I actions will also assess the role intangible cultural heritage plays for fostering societal resilience amidst societal challenges.

DIGITAL: The digital transition promises enormous opportunities for Europe’s cultural heritage and cultural and creative industries but also implies serious challenges. It is important to ensure that, throughout the digital transition, EU citizens enjoy cultural heritage and contribute to its interpretation and enrichment.

R&I actions will focus on how the benefits of digitised and digital cultural heritage may be exploited, reaping the benefits while avoiding the pitfalls. A particular focus will be on supporting the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), as well as on exploring challenges and opportunities of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence for culture, creativity and cultural heritage, and the ways cultural and creative industries can successfully engage with such technologies.

INNOVATIVE: To an ever-greater degree, creativity and cultural dimensions drive innovation and competitiveness – while underpinning resilience and well-being. Cultural and creative dimensions make new digital and physical products and services appealing and attractive. Similarly, societal transformations depend on behavioural changes, which are largely based on changes in lifestyle, culture and perceptions. In such processes, the human is at the centre, and cultural heritage, the arts and the cultural and creative industries are key.

R&I actions will cover a variety of subjects, such as strengthening the capacity of European design to act as a driver of sustainable competitiveness and reinforcing the role of culture and the arts for promoting European values, preventing conflicts, fostering peace and reconciliation and promoting health, well-being and social cohesion.

Many of the actions funded under this Destination will need access to and/or generate data. Where appropriate, actions should leverage the data and services available through European Research Infrastructures federated under the European Open Science Cloud or included in the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) and the ESFRI roadmap, as well as data from relevant Data Spaces. Particular efforts should be made to ensure that the data produced in the context of such actions is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable).

The innovation ecosystems created and nurtured by the Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), in particular the KIC “EIT Culture and Creativity”, may contribute to actions under this destination, and may as appropriate be considered by applicants.

In line with the Commission priorities, R&I actions under this Destination will help promote our European way of life, contribute to a Europe fit for the digital age and to achieving the European Green Deal goals, as well as support an economy that works for people. They will contribute to the New European Bauhaus^[3] initiative, to reaching the UN Sustainable Development Goals and to building a stronger, more participatory and crisis-resilient society and economy. They will support the realisation of the full potential of cultural heritage, arts and cultural and creative industries as drivers of sustainable innovation and a European sense of belonging.

The topic ‘HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-HERITAGE-03: A European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage – Innovative use cases’ aims at supporting the digital European cultural heritage collaborative space referred to as the “European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage” (ECCCH), and contributes to the vision and objectives of the Commission^[4].

An ex-ante impact assessment for the ECCCH was carried out between December 2021 and March 2022 by eight renowned independent experts contracted by the Commission^[5]. This ex-ante impact assessment examined and described the needs of a digital European cultural heritage collaborative space from the perspective of the foreseen users (cultural heritage institutions, researchers, cultural and creative industries, etc.) and of European societies, thoroughly reviewed existing initiatives that might satisfy parts of these needs, and outlined the most important aspects to consider in implementing such a collaborative space.

The conclusion of the ex-ante impact assessment is that the ECCCH is highly important to Europe’s cultural heritage institutions and to European societies. In order to address the urgent evolving needs of Europe’s cultural heritage sector in the digital age for specifically adapted collaborative spaces, the European Union is ramping up its investments through the ECCCH, and also the common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage (the Data Space)^[6] funded under the Digital Europe programme. The topics under the ECCCH are based on the conclusions and recommendations of the experts’ ex-ante impact assessment.

Some key characteristics of the vision for the ECCCH include:

• The ECCCH will be addressed to professionals^[7]. It will enable an unprecedented level of lasting collaboration and co-creation between public and private players that will generate new realms of research, knowledge and creation of societal value.
• The basic ECCCH platform will provide easy to use tools for the most important needs.
• Active user communities that contribute to training and support, as well as common data models, guidelines and libraries for developing tools (including support for Graphical User interfaces (GUI) and visualisation), will ensure that also less well-equipped institutions will draw the full benefit of the ECCCH.
• To enhance collaboration and co-creation, IPR rights of the digital objects stored in the ECCCH and produced by ECCCH-based collaboration will be fully recorded and traceable. Guidelines for the use of IPR rights, such as rights statements provided by RightsStatements.org should be used where appropriate. This will enable new business models in the intersection between cultural heritage and cultural and creative industries.
• The long-term sustainability of data and data formats is one of the underlying principles of the ECCCH. The ECCCH will tackle these challenges through its architecture and basic functionalities. The design and architecture of the ECCCH is based on three principles:
  1. digital twins of heritage objects,
  2. digital continuum, tracing all interactions with heritage objects and related data objects,
  3. digital ecosystem, open to all stakeholders, professions and activities to interact with each other and with the digital heritage objects, ultimately leading towards a new generation of multidimensional, interconnected and knowledge-enhanced heritage data forming digital commons, where the ECCCH will play a key role.
• The architecture of the ECCCH will ensure an evolutionary design, which will allow the adaption and incorporation of new technologies and tools and to fulfil new user requirements, while discontinuing less used tools.
• An open Application Programming Interface will allow new functionality to be developed and incorporated in the ECCCH by different initiatives, and encourage interoperability.
• The ECCCH will be open and inclusive, both in terms of the users of the platform and the connections to other related initiatives/platforms such as the Data Space.
• The ECCCH should build on the wealth of existing knowledge, technologies and work processes in Europe. It should draw on previous experience and best practice. The ECCCH and the Data Space should complement each other towards the common vision.
• The ECCCH should ensure, through its Governance body, the engagement of a wide range of appropriate representatives from Member States and Associated Countries, as well as from related EU initiatives.

The ECCCH will thus be a genuine collaboration platform, which brings together a wide array of professions, researchers and technologies for museums and other cultural heritage institutions. It will include and develop interactive tools for research, curation, restoration, preservation and for reaching out to citizens and cultural and creative industries, properly protect and manage IPR and allow commercial as well as non-commercial collaboration with a wide range of players.

All topics under the ECCCH are subject to the following conditions:

• All software developed should be open source, licensed under a CC0 public domain dedication or under an open source license as recommended by the Free Software Foundation^[8] and the Open Source Initiative^[9].
• If the use of fully open source software would require disproportional efforts or significantly diminish the quality or performance of the software, and if suitable non open source function libraries exist, such libraries may be used provided that a full user license free of charge for an unlimited period of time is granted to the consortium responsible for the ECCCH as well as to all users of the ECCCH.
• All software and other related deliverables should be compliant with the data model and the software development guidelines elaborated by the project funded under topic ‘HORIZON-CL2-2023-HERITAGE-ECCCH-01-01’.
• All projects funded should participate in concertation activities with the project funded under topic ‘HORIZON-CL2-2023-HERITAGE-ECCCH-01-01’

Expected impacts:

Proposals for topics under this Destination should set out a credible pathway to contributing to the following expected impact of the Horizon Europe Strategic Plan:

• The full potential of cultural heritage, arts and cultural and creative industries and sectors as drivers of both sustainable innovation and a European sense of belonging is realised through a continuous engagement with society, citizens and economic sectors.

Legal entities established in China are not eligible to participate in Innovation Actions in any capacity. Please refer to the Annex B of the General Annexes of this Work Programme for further details.

[1] Council conclusions of 21 May 2014 on cultural heritage as a strategic resource for a sustainable Europe (2014/C 183/08) https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52014XG0614(08)

[2] CETS 199 - Council of Europe Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (coe.int)

[3] The New European Bauhaus initiative was launched by European Commission President von der Leyen in her State of the European Union speech autumn 2020. More information here: https://europa.eu/new-european-bauhaus/index_en

[4] Recommendation (EU) 2021/1970 of 10 Nov 2021 on a common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage.

[5] European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Brunet, P., De Luca, L., Hyvönen, E., et al., Report on a European collaborative cloud for cultural heritage : ex – ante impact assessment, 2022, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/64014

[6] See further https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/staff-working-document-data-spaces

[7] In the context of the ECCCH calls, ‘professionals’ should be understood as the wide and interdisciplinary group of people working with cultural heritage in a professional or semi-professional way, researchers as well as people working with related activities such as within the cultural and creative industries.

[8] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list#SoftwareLicenses

[9] https://opensource.org/licenses

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