Cultural Heritage Cloud:
Founding Principles

The Cultural Heritage Cloud is a digital ecosystem designed to serve as a platform for cultural heritage professionals, researchers, and institutions across Europe.
The Cultural Heritage Cloud represents an unprecedented transformative initiative to unify Europe’s fragmented cultural heritage sector through advanced digital collaboration. By integrating cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), semantic analysis, and Digital Twins, it aims to democratise access to cultural heritage data, foster interdisciplinary research, and ensure the long-term preservation of Europe’s tangible and intangible heritage
The Cultural Heritage Cloud transcends traditional digitisation efforts by enabling collaborative analysis, knowledge co-creation, and the integration of fragmented datasets into a unified “digital continuum”. At its core, the Cultural Heritage Cloud operates on six foundational principles:

• Open science and inclusivity: democratisation of access to heritage data
• Collaborative knowledge production: co-creation across various disciplines and stakeholders
• Holistic digital transformation: complete integration of tangible and intangible heritage
• Sustainability and interoperability: ensuring long-term accessibility of resources
• Community-centric design: development driven by user needs
• A clear legal framework for tools and data available within the Cloud, for the sake of the sustainability

The Cultural Heritage Cloud is designed to serve communities and is built with inclusivity at its core. It aims to benefit a broad spectrum of stakeholders, including cultural heritage professionals who require advanced tools for analysis, conservation and restoration. Academics and researchers from diverse disciplines are also key beneficiaries, leveraging the Cloud for innovative studies and interdisciplinary collaboration. Additionally, it allows educators and the public to gain democratic access to heritage resources, fostering widespread engagement and learning. Most importantly, the Cultural Heritage Cloud prioritises marginalised communities by ensuring their often-underrepresented heritage is included and celebrated within this digital platform. This community-driven initiative emphasises the commitment to accessibility, representation, and collaboration in cultural heritage preservation.

The fragmentation of resources, the heterogeneity of results, as well as conditions for accessing knowledge and heritage, highlight the necessity -even more, the urgency – of building a cloud.

One of the most persistent challenges in the European cultural heritage sector is the dispersion of data in incompatible formats and isolated institutional practices. The Cultural Heritage Cloud addresses this challenge by harmonising metadata standards and creating a shared repository that includes 3D scans, digital archives, and conservation reports. This unified approach will radically transform and greatly facilitate cross-border collaborative research.

Many heritage institutions, particularly smaller ones or those in remote regions, severely lack resources to adopt advanced technologies. The Cultural Heritage Cloud infrastructure eliminates the need for costly local servers, while its training modules on AI and data analysis democratise access to cutting-edge methodologies. This democratisation of technology as a day-to-day tool represents an unprecedented opportunity for small institutions to fully participate in the digital revolution of heritage. This democratisation is further supported by the Cloud’s partnership model with research infrastructures, ensuring that smaller institutions can benefit from ongoing innovation driven by established communities of practice.

The technological gap is exacerbated by limited digital literacy among heritage professionals. 48.7% of survey respondents identified a lack of digital skills among staff as a major challenge, highlighting the need for tools that are accompanied by comprehensive training and support. The Cultural Heritage Cloud addresses this by integrating accessibility features directly into its platform, ensuring that technological advancement walks hand-in-hand with digital literacy. This approach recognises that 55.1% of respondents identified training on how to use the Cloud as a critical need.

While large cultural heritage institutions possess significant resources, they face unique challenges related to the integration of technological systems and workflows. According to survey data, 50% of respondents from larger organizations identified the lack of suitable platforms with tools adapted to cultural heritage professionals as a significant challenge. These institutions require not just digital tools, but comprehensive solutions that enable the reorganisation of production processes and maintenance of cultural heritage data. The Cultural Heritage Cloud addresses this need by providing an integrated ecosystem where large institutions can harmonise their existing systems with industry standards while maintaining compatibility with external stakeholders and partners.

The European cultural heritage does not include exclusively monuments, artefacts, and archival records, but also disposes of a huge variety of languages, rituals, traditional knowledge and practices that are often under-documented or at risk of disappearing. The Cultural Heritage Cloud must address the need for a more integrated and effective approach to both tangible and intangible heritage by ensuring their simultaneous documentation, study, and dissemination. Through advanced digitisation and cutting-edge technologies, the Cloud ensures that living heritage is interwoven with physical artefacts and historic sites in a coherent digital framework.

By capturing data on community-led traditional practices, and linking data infrastructures, the Cloud not only preserves but also enhances the visibility and appreciation of cultural expressions. Such a model of action promotes intercultural dialogue, transmission, and a richer, more inclusive understanding of heritage. In doing so, the Cultural Heritage Cloud contributes to the cultural sustainability of European societies, reinforcing the value of diverse traditions in the digital age.

As the sector is facing growing threats, from climate change and geopolitical instability to physical heritage sites, the Cultural Heritage Cloud offers a visionary solution: the creation of detailed Digital Twins, that protects knowledge against irreversible losses, enabling virtual reconstruction if artifacts or monuments are damaged. This digital backup capability represents unprecedented cultural insurance for future generations. The need for resilience is combined with a determination to combat the illicit trafficking of works from the world’s heritage.

The Cultural Heritage Cloud complements other European cultural and research initiatives through its unique three-tiered structure. At its foundation, the Cultural Heritage Cloud provides the core infrastructure and platform that orchestrates services and enables unified access. The second tier consists of approximately eight specialised project calls that develop the initial vertical domain applications. The third tier envisions long-term sustainability through research infrastructures that contribute both data and additional vertical applications developed by their communities of practice.

This structure creates a distinct relationship with Europeana, which plays a vital role in making cultural heritage widely accessible by improving content quality and metadata. While Europeana concentrates on access and discovery for the general public, the Cultural Heritage Cloud creates an orchestration layer where specialised tools can be developed, integrated, and accessed through a common infrastructure. The Cultural Heritage Cloud does not aim to replace Europeana’s important role but rather complements it by enabling more advanced analytical and collaborative capabilities for professionals within a Digital Commons framework.
Similarly, the Cloud strategically aligns with the principles of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), which promotes open science across all research fields. The Cultural Heritage Cloud infrastructure ensures interoperability with EOSC principles while addressing the specific needs of the cultural heritage sector. This complementarity allows the Cultural Heritage Cloud to uphold shared values such as inclusivity and open access to knowledge while providing specialised entry points and services for heritage professionals.

In relation to E-RIHS (European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science), which provides integrated access to heritage science facilities and expertise through platforms like ARCHLAB, DIGILAB, FIXLAB, and MOLAB, and other research infrastructures (DARIAH, CLARIN), ECCCH establishes a parallel but synergistic relationship. These infrastructures maintain their crucial role as both data providers and homes to communities of practice with domain expertise. While research infrastructures are expected to play a central role in developing future vertical applications, the Cultural Heritage Cloud ecosystem is deliberately open to contributions from independent developers, research teams, companies, and other stakeholders who wish to develop and propose their own domain-specific applications. This open approach ensures innovation comes from diverse sources while maintaining the critical connection to communities of practice. In the long term, these diverse communities will not only provide data but also develop additional vertical applications that extend the Cloud’s capabilities beyond the initial applications created through the dedicated project calls.

This approach creates a sustainable ecosystem where the Cultural Heritage Cloud focuses on maintaining the core infrastructure and orchestration capabilities, while addressing sector-specific legal and operational challenges. Research infrastructures contribute their specialised knowledge through data and applications, forming a complementary network where each component plays to its strengths. Together, these initiatives collectively advance the preservation and understanding of Europe’s cultural heritage while ensuring long-term sustainability through clear role differentiation and collaborative development.

The purpose of the Cultural Heritage Cloud is to enable its users to manipulate heterogeneous data sets relating to the same enriched Cultural heritage asset (the Heritage Digital Twin), to enable the collaborative production of new knowledge in the largest possible sense. We strive to achieve this by providing seamless access to data, metadata and applications through cataloguing and search and retrieval services. The Cloud offers access to all the elements through a federated and distributed Knowledge Graph (KG) that allows an integrated and holistic you to the available information and tools and leverages technologies, including AI, to provide intelligent ways to find and access data, to capture processes and workflows and to allow collaboration on top of them so as to enhance, augment and create knowledge.

Whilst the initial vertical applications are being developed through dedicated project calls, the Cloud’s architecture is deliberately designed to accommodate future contributions from research communities, independent developers, and other stakeholders. This open ecosystem approach ensures continuous evolution and expansion of available tools and services, with the Cloud maintaining its primary role as the orchestrating infrastructure that provides unified access and interoperability. The technical and conceptual framework remains flexible and extensible to allow the proper introduction of new data, metadata and applications to the Cloud family, while assuring access and reuse by all involved users for them.

The sustainability of the Cultural Heritage Cloud will rely on a mission-driven financial model rooted in ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) principles. A multi-fund approach will be adopted, combining public – from the European Commission to national and local governments – and private investments, in-kind contributions, and revenue from commercial services. Furthermore, not-for-profit services will ensure equitable access and foster long-term user engagement. The diversified funding strategy will reduce reliance on any single source and ensure long-term viability. Potential income streams include subscription fees, licensing agreements, sponsorships, and partnerships with cultural institutions, as well as public and private grants. Investment strategy will be designed to meet evolving users’ needs and support continuous technological upgrades, aligning with both technological innovation and societal goals. A forward-looking ESG-driven business plan is being developed to secure long-term sustainability, with a strong commitment to excellence and accessibility for the diverse communities of cultural and creative sectors.

A sustainable Cloud requires inclusive governance to function and stay up to local, national and international standards – as well as to keep fulfilling the expectations of its users and stakeholders. A robust and adaptable governance framework will be established, supported by an appropriate legal entity. They will ensure continuity of services over time, while remaining flexible to adapt to future legislative, economical and societal changes. This governance system will be based on core values – equity, transparency, accountability – to guarantee the democratic management of the Cloud. This sustainability framework is strengthened by clear role differentiation with research infrastructures, where the Cloud focuses on infrastructure orchestration whilst partners contribute to specialized applications and data.
The ECHOES project’s mission is to establish the Cultural Heritage Cloud. Its work began in the spring of 2024 and is expected to continue until 2029. By the end of these five years, the Cloud should be firmly established within the European research and cultural landscape.