European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage – Innovative Tools for Data Documentation and Management

ExpectedOutcome:Projects should contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:The European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) is widely used by European cultural heritage professionals and researchers[1] for creating, enriching and refining annotated bibliographies linked to digital cultural heritage objects[2].The ECCCH is widely used by European cultural heritage professionals and researchers for documenting the results of fieldwork such as archaeological or paleontological excavations and studies.European cultural heritage professionals and researchers are provided with clear information as well as targeted training modules on the innovative tools and methods developed. Scope:This topic aims at developing and implementing a set of innovative tools and methods on the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) for documenting, interlinking and organising data. Concrete applications of these tools and methods should be provided for at least the following uses:Creating, enriching and refining annotated bibliographiesDocumenting the results of fieldwork such as archaeological or paleontological excavations or other collection processes and studies Creating, enriching and refining annotated bibliographiesA crucial task in both education and professional duties within cultural heritage is compiling bibliographies. This time-consuming activity entails gathering relevant literature on a cultural heritage object, entering bibliographic references in a list, assessing each document, and producing notes that are subsequently saved in the bibliography. This work has a value of its own, not only as part of the papers or reports created. Bibliographies therefore ought to be kept on the ECCCH, made accessible, and further enriched, refined and extended by collaborative and supervised efforts.For this use, projects funded under this topic should make sure that the ECCCH offers tools that automate much of the tedious tasks, and support cooperative work and re-use. Existing tools and bibliographic frameworks should be evaluated and when appropriate built upon. The tools to be developed should offer significant added value to its users beyond what is currently available, and should be developed based on the data model of the ECCCH, gathering data from and incorporating data in the ECCCH. These tools may, to the extent feasible, include functionality to parse and enrich data from for instance retrodigitised sources not readily machine readable. Given a topic or a specific heritage object and/or a small initial set of papers selected by the user, enhanced AI technologies working on text or/and on images should be able to retrieve related works, evaluate the fit of a given paper with the subject of the research, and produce a preliminary bibliography. The authoring system should support the creation, editing, and annotation of bibliographies. It should be possible to define with whom the results are shared (e.g. with a restricted group of professionals or with all users).Documenting the results of fieldwork such as archaeological or paleontological excavations or other collection processes and studiesFieldwork such as archaeological or paleontological exploration and research typically produce large amounts of different kinds of data, such as survey documentation and documents presenting, narrating and interpreting the findings, photographic data, 3D models, drawings, maps and geographic information system data. At a later stage, most of the findings become assets for cultural heritage institutions such as museums. Such activities (excavation, study, etc.), thus, are a crucial phase of the musealisation process. Moreover, most countries enforce legal obligations regarding the archiving of data produced by excavations, as well as periodic reports.For this use, projects funded under this topic should offer a set of tools that makes the ECCCH a valuable resource for the community involved in such excavations and studies, using an extensible data model based on semantic technology, as well as a repository for the produced data, together with appropriate data visualisation and analysis instruments. Regulated reporting and archiving obligations in different countries should be analysed, and to the extent possible semi-automatised.Ontologies and vocabularies should be extended as needed to define the data structures and relationships between different data, in view of achieving interoperability. Repositories from different institutions and countries should be inter-operable and inter-connected. The semantic information layer should make it possible for AI technologies to access and "learn" from the archive. An extension to the ECCCH 3D browser should provide an interactive and visual interface to excavation data, and to the related findings.Also, citation capabilities should be integrated, to facilitate publication, sharing and reuse of data. Authoring tools should provide a way for the user to build "narratives"[3] starting from the archival data.With a view to use resources efficiently and go beyond the state of the art, projects funded under this topic should, where appropriate, build on previous existing research, methods and solutions. Proposals should therefore ensure that existing tools and methods and their potential (re-)use are properly examined.In particular, in order to exploit potential synergies, proposals may consider, where appropriate, to build on the work of the projects funded under the topics HORIZON-INFRA-2021-EOSC-01-04 and HORIZON-INFRA-2023-EOSC-01-03, especially concerning Science Knowledge Graphs (SKGs) as flexible tools to monitor and track events of science linked to provenance, publishing, citation, data processing, data and software usage, as well as service consumption.[4]Ease of use for the target users is of paramount importance. Therefore, tools and methods should be developed in close collaboration with actively involved representative target