Enabling the creation, provision and reuse of high-quality, semantically rich, interoperable cultural heritage data

ECHOLOT revolutionizes the provision and reuse of high quality, interoperable Cultural Heritage (CH) data through AI-powered enrichment workflows, seamlessly integrated into the ECCCH.
The new end-to-end solution relies on knowledge graphs and open source software (notably MediaWiki suite) for the application of the FAIR data principles and further integration of data within European infrastructures – Europeana, DS4CH, EOSC – as well as collaborative public knowledge bases, such as Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.

Using a combination of AI-, knowledge-, and rule-based approaches, ECHOLOT delivers hybrid curation workflows that efficiently combine automated processing and human input to perform multilingual and multimedia annotation, description generation, and entity recognition. The service features user-friendly interfaces and natively supports embedding rights metadata and chain-of-production provenance, thereby preserving the value and integrity of CH datasets. The system will be validated through five real-world case studies across Europe.

ECHOLOT’s mission is to develop a next-generation, interoperable system for the collaborative curation, enrichment and reuse of CH data.
The project brings together major initiatives, such as Europeana and the Wikimedia movement, and supports the adoption of the Cultural Heritage Cloud by lowering technical and organisational barriers and enabling institutions of any size to participate.
ECHOLOT’s primary objective is the development of a software suite for the collaborative curation, enrichment, and publication of CH data, seamlessly integrated within ECCCH. This aims to facilitate interoperability across disciplines, repositories, and platforms by leveraging open standards, Semantic Web technologies, and Linked Open Data principles. Further objectives include the provision of AI-enhanced modules to support entity linking and reconciliation, automated description generation, multimedia annotation, and multilingual alignment, combining advanced computational methods with human-in-the-loop workflows to ensure quality and contextual accuracy. Particular attention will be devoted to the capture and representation of detailed provenance, intellectual property, and rights metadata in both human- and machine-readable formats. Sustainable adoption will be fostered through open-source development practices, compatibility with the MediaWiki ecosystem, and active community engagement.

By the end of the project, ECHOLOT will be fully integrated as a service within the ECCCH infrastructure, enabling CH professionals to collaborate through hybrid workflows that combine automated AI processing with human input. The system will support the publication of high-quality, semantically enriched data to Europeana and Wikimedia platforms, while ensuring its availability for reuse within ECCCH and the DS4CH. Dozens of CH institutions and hundreds of professionals will be trained in the system, fostering widespread uptake and operational capacity. In parallel, new collaboration and business models will be developed to promote the sustainable reuse of CH data, underpinned by a strong coalition of institutional stakeholders and open-source communities, committed to the long-term sustainability of ECHOLOT. In the longer term, ECHOLOT will contribute to the digital and societal transformation of the CH sector and support the emergence of new collaborative networks, bridging institutional heritage and citizen-driven knowledge commons. ECHOLOT’s results will stimulate sustainable innovation across CH institutions and the creative industries.

In this section, you will find the official documents produced during the project lifetime. Reports and deliverables will be made public as the project progresses. These documents will be essential to share the results of our work with the scientific community, policy makers, and the general public. We invite you to visit this page regularly to stay updated on the new documents published by our project. If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact us.