Following the Call for Innovative Use Cases for the Cultural Heritage Cloud (HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-HERITAGE-03), ECHOES is delighted to welcome eight more Sister Projects.

CULTUR-ACT – Collaborative Use Case Living Labs Fostering Tools and ResoURces Validation and Adoption in the European Cloud for Next-Gen Digital Heritage Communities Cooperation

CULTURAL.ACT is designed as a real-world proving ground for the ECCCH, leveraging on a community of CHIs and CCIs – of diverse types, cultural heritage domains, disciplines, size and expertise – that agree to collaborate and share experiences in the use of ECCCH tools and resources in core tasks of their own processes and working environments.

HERITWIN – Cultural Heritage Digital Twins

HERITWIN strengthens Europe’s cultural resilience by validating the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) through five real large-scale pilots in Sweden, Norway, Spain, The UK (Northern Ireland), and Greece. The project advances semantic digital twins, eXtended Reality reconstructions, preparedness modelling tools to support conservation, education, public engagement, tourism, and interoperable European data spaces.

MNEME – A Collaborative Memory Platform for Cultural Heritage

Through five pilots in Greece, Spain, Slovenia, Italy and France, MNEME ingests curated assets (texts, images, 3D models) and harmonises them with CIDOC-CRM/IIIF to form a federated knowledge graph that enables cross-collection discovery, comparative analysis and shared storytelling across institutions.

POLARIS –  Empowering Libraries to Lead Co-Creation and Innovation through the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage

POLARIS will establish a cloud-ready ecosystem of tools, services, and training for libraries. Three flagship pilots will demonstrate large-scale, diverse use cases: the British Library (750,000 digitised volumes), the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (musicological heritage via the POLYMNIA collection), and the Malatestiana Library in Cesena (Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts).

Narratia – Visitor-Centred Generative Narratives and Mixed Reality to Transform the Cultural Heritage Experience

Across Europe, many heritage sites remain under-visited due to partial preservation and limited inclusivity. Narratia addresses this challenge by combining generative AI and immersive technologies to transform visits into personalised, dynamic stories where visitors become protagonists.

UM-EU_WWII – Re-Memorizing EUWWII Urban Memories of World War II and Totalitarian Regimes

UM-EU_WWII reconnects nine urban sites across eight countries—marked by occupation, repression, resistance and memory silences—through a shared interpretive framework and interoperable digital infrastructure. Combining historical scholarship, digital humanities, immersive technologies and participatory practices to ensure both scientific rigour and civic relevance, the project will generate a FAIR-compliant corpus of more than 3 TB of archival sources, oral testimonies, 3D models and semantic datasets, aligned with ECCCH standards.

Walking Memory

WALKING MEMORY fosters an inclusive, participatory, and technology-enabled approach by combining AR Memory Walks, digital storytelling toolkits, and FAIR data pipelines into a coherent framework tested across diverse cultural and geographical contexts. The project’s overall objective is to deliver ECCCH-validated workflows and tools that lower adoption barriers, support replication, and embed community voices into Europe’s digital heritage.

AVCloud – Audiovisual Use Cases for ECCCH

Vast numbers of films, videos and audio recordings constitute the holdings of film and media archives, collections, and museums, while many other cultural heritage institutions and research organisations also collect AV media objects. The AVCloud project will integrate Europe’s massive, under-explored AV heritage into the ECCCH through 15 real-life AV use cases.