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Welcome to the ECHOES FAQ page. In this section, you will find a series of useful resources to deepen your knowledge of the topics covered by our project. You can find guides, tutorials, and other educational materials that will help you make the most of our tools and resources. This section is constantly updated, we invite you to visit it often to stay up-to-date.

We hope you find this section useful and that it helps you better understand our project and its activities. If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact us. We are always available to provide support and assistance.

Project Overview and Value Proposition

ECHOES is a European Union funded project whose mission is to set up the Cultural Heritage Cloud, integrating the results of all ECCCH-funded projects from the 2023-2025 EU calls.
The European Commission (DG RTD) has explicitly requested ECHOES to be the Single Entry Point (SEP) for stakeholders, in order to highlight the coherence of the Cultural Heritage Cloud initiative as a whole.
In other words, all ECCCH-funded projects are members of a larger community coordinated by ECHOES. Project leaders selected through ECCCH-related EU calls are invited to join the ECHOES Stakeholders Council.

Unfortunately, ECHOES is not eligible for the Hop-On Facility.
ECHOES is classified as an ‘Innovation action’ under the Horizon Europe nomenclature, and the Hop-On Facility is only open to ‘Research & Innovation’ projects. Additionally, if a project already has partners in the ‘Widening’ countries, it may not be joined by other partners from these countries – ECHOES already has several ‘Widening’ members.

The European Cloud for Cultural Heritage OpEn Science (ECHOES) was selected for the call HORIZON- CL2-2023-HERITAGE-ECCCH-01. Our main goal is to design and establish the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), also called the Cultural Heritage Cloud.

Currently, there is an open call (HORIZON-CL2-2025-01-HERITAGE-03: A European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage – Innovative use cases) that aims at implementing real use cases and carrying out demanding end-to-end testing of the platform and its tools, in order to verify its capabilities and improve the Cultural Heritage Cloud. The activities carried out should focus on concrete use cases, undertaken by the participating institutions, professionals and researchers with a view to improve their results or work processes.

All the requirements for submitting a proposal are available on the official website. Deadline for submission of proposals is 16 September 2025 17:00:00 Brussels time). The proposals must assure technical and coordination cooperation with ECHOES. In order to be properly acquainted with the overall vision of the project, consult the Objectives and Activities page. Please be aware that we are not responsible for evaluating or selecting projects.

Future applicants are strongly encouraged to monitor ECHOES updates and open calls/tenders from 2023, 2024, and 2025.

Here is an overview of current and upcoming integrations within the ECCCH environment.

Current integrations include the following projects:

  • AUTOMATA
  • textAIles
  • HERITALISE

Future integrations:

  • An additional 10 projects are expected to be funded and launched between September 2025 and January 2026.
  • The third ECCCH call for applications is currently open.

ECCCH sister project results will be made accessible and interoperable through ECHOES.

ECHOES will provide a comprehensive digital ecosystem that goes beyond mere data gathering. It creates an integrated Virtual Environment for cultural heritage professionals, fostering collaboration, knowledge co-creation, and innovative tool development. ECHOES aims to streamline the use of services and tools that was previously challenging due to infrastructure limitations or lack of community synergies.

ECHOES and the common European data space for cultural heritage are closely complementary initiatives. The data space serves as the main EU entry point for access to cultural heritage data, for use and reuse by large audiences, including educators, creatives and citizens, as well as by other sectors and other data spaces. ECHOES aims to create Digital Commons that integrates services and tools to form a comprehensive virtual environment for cultural heritage professionals. The data space will be a key partner for accessing specific kinds of data and metadata on cultural heritage. While distinct, ECHOES and the data space will complement and reinforce each other, particularly in terms of data sharing and capacity building. Through interoperable frameworks, data from the data space will flow securely to ECHOES for heritage professionals to work with, while research outputs and data generated in ECHOES will be accessible through the data space for reuse across various sectors. The two initiatives will also join forces to support capacity building, fostering a more inclusive, sustainable and unified digital heritage environment. This synergy will enhance accessibility and foster new collective knowledge creation. Other Data Spaces (e.g. the Data Space for Tourism) might be integrated in the process of developing the Cultural Heritage Cloud.

Integration and Interoperability

Projects winning ECCCH-related calls should be designed with flexibility in mind, ready to adapt to ECHOES’ evolving architecture. These projects should focus on modular designs that can interface via REST APIs and adaptable data models. ECHOES will provide detailed integration guidelines as the platform develops; these guidelines will allow the projects to adapt their development and achieve the desired level of integration with ECHOES. The effort to integrate key aspects like services and data models are supposed to be covered by the projects that are funded under the ECCCH related calls. This means that funded projects must allocate appropriate resources and effort towards:

  • Implementing the required integration interfaces
  • Adapting their data models to align with ECHOES standards
  • Ensuring their services can interoperate with the ECHOES platform
  • Following the integration guidelines provided by ECHOES

Projects selected through ECCCH-related EU calls must ensure interoperability with common data formats (e.g., RDF), open community data and metadata models and open-access APIs. This approach facilitates seamless integration and data exchange within the ECHOES ecosystem. The guidelines will clarify the levels of integration with ECHOES; however, the decision remains with each project to determine its chosen level of integration within the allowed options.

Yes, existing projects with commercial components can be integrated into ECHOES. ECHOES will release all components developed within the project under an open-source license and strongly recommends that associated projects and external contributors follow the same model. However, as the burden of integration will fall on the projects’ side, they can decide the level and intensity of this integration. Components provided outside the ECHOES project should at least carry a clear and specific usage license and detail correctly and exactly user requirements. While this covers the technical part, commercial components functioning will also be affected by the business plan of ECHOES, which will be detailed later on.

During the ECHOES project’s lifetime, projects that win current or future ECCCH-related EU calls will be invited to participate in the Stakeholders Council where the joint activities will be discussed and requirements for the common presence of the ECCCH ecosystem will be elaborated. Moreover, for the technical needs of these winning projects, the Integration taskforce will invite them to provide technical requirements and define a roadmap to facilitate their integration. In order to achieve a full integration within the Cultural Heritage Cloud, these projects will need to follow and comply with the guidelines provided by the ECHOES consortium; as detailed earlier, the desired level of integration remains a decision of the individual projects.

We foresee three (3) different ways of integration to the ECCCH environment, depending on how deeply the different projects want to integrate to the cloud infrastructure being built by ECHOES.

1- Integration at the data/metadata level

Applications and services that use the ECCCH environment to access, exchange, store and/or retrieve the diverse types of data and datasets that would be made available through the cloud (but not necessarily stored on the cloud). In order to integrate at the data level, application and services should follow the requirements for their metadata descriptions and provide the necessary ways to access the actual data through APIs, endpoints or other means as it is deemed necessary. Access to data and metadata might depend on the corresponding licences. While ECHOES strives to use open and free data, we do not want to exclude data published under different licences right from the beginning.

2- Integration at the service level

Applications and services that use the ECCCH environment will be able to access the environment through APIs that would provide different services like authentication services, data ingestion services or search services. Integrating at the service level will happen to corresponding APIs that would be published as the ECHOES project advances. The services from the ECCCH which will be used remains the responsibility of the corresponding applications. In these cases, the applications might choose to rely on the cloud for their processing needs as well.

3- Integration at the application level

Applications and services will also be allowed to use existing application(s) to perform specific tasks in a way that allows the interaction between them without the involvement of the user. For example, a workflow might need to invoke an existing application to perform a specific task and then directly feed the results of this task to the next one. We can imagine like that the ability to provide final results without the need for the intermediate results to be stored or managed by the cloud.

Based on the above, we can identify three different cases that applications and services can adhere to, when they want to integrate to the ECCCH in different ways.

Case 1: Vertical Applications (and other tightly integrated cases)
Applications and services that want to achieve a deep integration would need to integrate both at the data/metadata and the service levels. This means that these applications will depend on the cloud for data/metadata storage and querying and searching but also for managing users (authentication/authorization, access management, etc.) and will rely on the cloud for their processing needs. More information on the Vertical Applications developed by ECHOES can be found at the Tools page of this website.

Case 2: Extension by choice (case of Cascading Grants, ECCCH sister projects)
In this case, applications and services might choose which combination they prefer and to what extent they want to invest into their integration to the cloud (depending also on the requirements). The idea is to suggest the tighter integration possible, but to allow the applications and services the choices that maximize the benefits to the corresponding communities.

Case 3: Light coupling
We need to allow applications and services to interact with the ECCCH environment in different ways. This last case is there to remind that lighter integration would be always possible where organizations make their offers available through the cloud, benefit to the extent that does not disrupt their workflows and use the cloud to their benefit. Specific requirements will be imposed for this kind of usage.

As described in the question about the different ways of integration, using APIs will not be the only way to integrate to the ECCCH environment but will be one of the major ways offered. APIs will be published as the different components will be becoming available. We plan to engage into 6-month long release cycles and more detailed planning for the different components will be published as we advance.

ECHOES plans to release a wealth of services to be made available to developers of applications and services in the CH domain. A preliminary list of expected services follows but we need to stress that this list is neither final nor exhaustive:

  • Authentication
  • Authorization
  • Access management
  • Security
  • Catalogues (data/applications/services)
  • (Intelligent) search and querying (over the Knowledge Graph)
  • Data/Metadata storage
  • Data/Metadata management
  • Connection to major data sources (e.g. Data Spaces)
  • Processing facilities
  • Monitoring
  • Logging
  • Support

Another set of service will come from our Vertical Applications and will facilitate the integration of other applications to the ECCCH infrastructure. Requirements on applications and services might include logging and auditing, compliance with the metadata model, passing through the ECHOES authentication and authorization interface (see also the question on integration above).

Data Model and Technical Resources

Yes, the ECHOES data model is being designed to be extensible. We encourage proposals to extend the model to address specific needs, as long as they maintain compatibility with the core ECHOES framework. Projects funded through ECCCH-related calls that wish to extend the data model must allocate appropriate resources for both the extension development and its integration with the core ECHOES framework, as this effort falls under their responsibility.

ECHOES will be built on already existing open standards, and the specifications of ECHOES will be open. ECHOES will provide a set of basic services to handle processing and storage on the Cloud and other middle level components to support the data and metadata models and the services that concern them. While specific details are evolving, we aim to offer clear guidelines and support to ensure project compatibility. Based on the requirements’ solicitation process, we will try to support the project needs to the fullest extent possible.

Open Source and IPR

ECHOES will publish the developed components as open source, but we will make sure that the license chosen will also allow the development of commercial applications on top of them. to be online with the EU requirements for the ECHOES project. The business model of the ECHOES platform and the corresponding legal entity that will emerge, will not be based on commercializing the cloud software that will be developed (which will be in most of the cases built on top of open-source existing efforts). How this business model will align with the business models of different application and service providers, will be detailed later in the project. The ECHOES data model makes clear and explicit licensing information a mandatory component for all data within the system. Regardless of which database or data model is used, every dataset must include clear and unambiguous licensing terms that specify how the data can be accessed and used. While promoting open and FAIR data as core principles, supporting IPR at different levels is integral for the future development and sustainability of the Cultural Heritage Cloud. This approach ensures that both data providers and users have clarity about usage rights, fostering trust and enabling proper data governance within the ecosystem.

Participation and Communication

ECHOES offers collaboration through surveys, workshops, and community meetings. Funding opportunities include cascading grants (more information by end of 2024, first call in February 2025) along with the ECCCH related EU open calls. Follow our official channels for updates on participation.
Interested parties can also take part in the ECHOES Consultation, to be launched in December 2024. The consultation’s aim is to better understand the cultural heritage communities, their practices and needs – in terms of tools, workflows, digital literacy, training, capacity building, etc. – by collecting feedback from professionals and researchers working on national, European and international projects. This consultation will take the form of a detailed survey and will be followed by focused interviews.

In order to meet the European Commission’s requirements to present the Cultural Heritage Cloud initiative as a large cohesive community, it is of paramount importance to coordinate communication efforts to present ourselves in a coherent and consistent way to our stakeholders. For this purpose, ECHOES has developed a document outlining the guidelines for designing the visual identity and communication strategy of projects funded under ECCCH-related EU calls. This document outlines the requirements for developing the project logo and website. All projects funded under the ECCCH 2023-2025 EU calls must comply with these guidelines. The guidelines are available at https://www.echoes-eccch.eu/communication-kit/.

You can follow the progress of the ECHOES platform through the official website and communication channels. Updates will be shared as soon as they are available according to the project work plan.

Got a question? Don’t hesitate to reach out!