The Heritage Horizons Project week – funded by the European Union and organized by Europeana – took place from 25th-29th November 2024 and addressed new developments and projects in the cultural heritage sector in conjunction with the Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage (DSCH). This blog will try to summarize the wide-ranging topics and projects and will give you an overview of the newest developments in the sector.
Day 1
The first day of the project week was divided into two thematic blocks. The first block was all about diving into the topic by outlining the goals and aspirations for the DSCH and clarifying the political guidelines, whereas the second block focused on the the work of the European Heritage Hub project.
Europe’s vision
The general vision for the EU proclaims a “Triple Transition”: The future shall be green, digital and social. With regard to the cultural heritage sector that means to develop sustainable practices, see the digital heritage as a public good and make it people-centred, value & culture-led. That said, the project week focused on these three pillars as well as the topics of 3D, AI and reusability of data. For the EU Commission, cultural heritage work in that context means to digitise, enrich and preserve it, especially for the younger generation to learn and take profit of it.
In addition, the outlines of the Cloud for Cultural Heritage accompanying the Data Space are gradually forming. The most important problems to solve in that regard are the sustainable exchange of data and a coordinated initiatives governance and data governance. There is also the need for a standardized 3D data contribution workflow and further offers for capacity building.
European Heritage Hub
This project started in May 2023 and is a EU-funded pilot project connecting heritage stakeholders and initiatives across Europe to support the transition towards a more sustainable, digital and inclusive society. They aim to become a permanent knowledge, networking and advocacy platform, not only EU-wide, but also for its neighbouring countries.
The Hub is responsible for the Heritage Dialogues Webinar Series. The second webinar “Cultural Heritage for a regenerative digital transition in EU neighbouring countries” was also part of the first day of the project week and addressed the following topics:
- Digital Cultural Heritage of Ukraine
- Crimean Tatar Language Project (About)
- Heritage Dialogue hosting two representatives of cultural heritage projects in neighbouring countries: TUMO (Armenia) and IDEAA Urban House Association (Serbia)
The Hub Community is planning to organize four more webinars in this series. Other projects are the Heritage Library, the Policy Monitor and several youth-related events.
Day 2
The second part of the project week mainly dealt with new developments, considerations and software in the 3D cultural heritage sector. Since 3D digitization and data accessibility and reusability are main tasks for the DSCH, the need for engagement and considerations concerning standardization arises. With the TwinIt! project the foundations for engagement on a EU-wide level were established.
EDM for 3D
EDM as Europeana’s metadata standard was collaboratively developed to fit the needs of different heritage institutions. The question arose, if it still matches the high-level requirements of 3D data. In conclusion, this question was answered with “Yes”, although Europeana identified several future recommendations for improving the standard:
- maintain edm:WebResource as fully fledged resources (“one-to-one” principle)
- finding expressions on how the model has been produced in its relation to physical reality
- finding representations for different types of 3D models (technical aspects like point clouds, polygon meshes, textures etc.
- representing intended usage of 3D model
Another necessity is the upgrade of the Europeana Publishing framework for 3D to provide a framework for 3D data quality. Further activities will include recommendations and guidelines on publishing 3D and capacity building units in form of online courses.
Data Space projects enhancing 3D development
In this session, several Data Space projects to shape the future of 3D cultural heritage in th EU were presented:
- 3DBigDataSpace
- Lip3D (Living forever the Past through a 3Digital world)
- RCToDC (From Raw Collection To Digital Collection)
Those initiatives engange in 3D development on a large scale. They are all about developing workflows for aggregating 3D models, finding storage solutions and developing new tools and methods to enable the use of 3D models in environments like Virtual Realoty (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and 4D world applications. They also pursue engaging in educational activities and creating standardised workflows and training units.
The second part of the session consisted of several software demos for 3D viewers, platforms for storing and enriching 3D data for Europeana and the Data Space as well as the free smartphone software “Scaniverse” that enables on-device, low-weight 3D scans and processing. The aim behind presenting those software possibilities is to find an alternative solution for US-based for-profits platforms.
Day 3
The third day of the project week further elaborated 3D digitization and explicitely highlighted different application scenarios in EU-funded projects. The focus was on sharing and reusing the CH objects in immersive use cases like XR (eXtended Reality).
Another point of interest was the digitisation of cultural heritage of minority communities and the REEVALUATE project working on a more conceptional level.
Digitizing and reusing photographic heritage in 2D and 3D
- exhibitions, blogs and galleries at Europeana (Photoconsortium)
- guidelines, tools, capacity building and case studies by EUreka3D
- importance to have complexity of 3D digitization in mind (data, metadata, paradata)
- quality assessment
- production of XR experiences with cultural contents, creating so-called “memory twins” (capturing history of an object next to its geometric structure)
- Digitisation Use Cases
5Dculture: Deploying and Demonstrating a 3D Cultural Heritage Space
- Goal: enrich offer of 3D cultural heritage assets, tools and know-how and foster reuse
- Content domains: fashion, archeology, historic buildings and cityscapes
- Recent projects:
- 3D Fashion Content Reuse (supporting AR immersive experiences)
- “Virtual Fitting Room”
- Bringing Fragile Collection Items Together: A Virtual Museum Visit Through Social VR -> innovative experience by bringing people from different locations together in a virtual space
- Reuse Of High-Quality 3D Models: The Case From Bru Na Boinne World Heritage Site
- 3D Archeology in Educational Scenarios
- Reuse of 3D Data of Historic Buildings and Cityscapes
- Postcards Re-Imagined: Using 3D-enabled Storytelling for Cultural Tourism
- 3D Fashion Content Reuse (supporting AR immersive experiences)
XR Culture
- Goal: enrich Data Space for Cultural Heritage with AI and XR technologies to generate and reuse 3D cultural heritage models
- AI technologies to improve 3D quality: e.g. Advanced 3D reconstruction
- XR for:
- Heritage at risk
- Heritage Tourism
- Dispersed and Lost Heritage
- Education
Additional Data Space projects
- Watching Videos Like a Historian (EuroClio) -> for educators
- provides guidance on how to effectively integrate audiovisual materials into the teaching process
- Framework, Toolkit and Webinar series
- Digitisation of cultural heritage of minority communities for equity and renewed engagement (DIGICHer)
- increase minorities involvement
- raise understanding for the importance of maintaining CHOs of indigenous groups and minorities in general
- REEVALUATE: Framework for safe, open, collaborative and inclusive digitization and management of cultural heritage
- creation and maintenance of said framework
Day 4
The fourth day turned the spotlight on two very central topics when talking about the future of the cultural heritage sector and the Data Space. The conference day started with a presentation on the DE-BIAS project, followed by an interactive discussion round. The second part focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI), its possibilities and limitations.
DE-BIAS
This project is funded by the Digital Europe Programme and focuses on Europeana and its data and aims to enrich the data of the Data Space by developing solutions for a more inclusive and respectful description of cultural heritage. The project is very advanced by now and has reached a lot of its initial goals:
- build tool to detect problematic language in Europeana (and other archival databases)
- create vocabulary of contentious terms and offer alternatives
- collaboration with communities to co-create vocabulary -> events and workshops
- Capacity Building
The project is still ongoing and requries continuous work. The tool also offers and API endpoint to ensure reusability and will be fully available in December. The next steps for the project will be to apply the “Recommendations to represent diversity in metadata” and further invest in capacity building.
AI4Culture
The next big topic was the presence and future of AI in the cultural heritage sector. The project AI4Culture in that respect offers an AI platform for the cultural heritage data space and offers capacity building and open and usable AI technologies. It is trying to overcome the barriers in AI applications like knowledge gaps and the general complexity of combining AI with other digital components. The project consists of three pillars:
- AI Tools
- Open Datasets (for training and testing AI models)
- Upskilling Material (technical material like documentations and user tutorials)
There are already several open source tools online that reach from text recognition (OCR, HTR) to image analysis tools. Next to the Upskilling Material there is also a “Recipe” section that offers step-by-step instructions about how to use and combine different tools to solve complex tasks.
Day 5
The fifth and last day was a resumption of Europe’s “Triple Transition”, that was already dealt with in the first session. This time the presentation focused on “Synergies with other large data initiatives”.
In that context they presented two additional projects in connection with the Data Space:
ECHOES
- European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH)
- shared collaboration platform
Heritalise
- aims to transform cultural heritage documentation with advanced digitization and AI tools
- integrated with the ECCCH
The second part of the day spotlighted the importance of interaction and communication between data spaces, because on a european Level they are all linked in some way. Therefore the Common European Tourism Data Space was explained.