Infrastructure

The technical architecture of the Cultural Heritage Cloud (ECCCH) aims to produce a robust, secure, modular and extensible environment that will cover in a distributed and federated way the needs of different stakeholders across Europe. The design and development of the main building blocks of the ECCCH will be the results of the effort done by the ECHOES project and aims to cover Europe as a whole in the first place, while allowing large, medium and small cultural heritage organizations to seamlessly integrate in and benefit from advanced collaborative opportunities, secure exchange of data, application and services and advanced computing and storage facilities. The CHC will offer a set of standard technical services, including services for access, security for the data, and eventually intellectual property rights as well. Download the Cloud Architecture and main components (PDF).

The project will be based on a technical backbone which will adapt and improve current open source solutions and on a conceptual Knowledge Graph (KG) that will allow for description, annotation and search of the cultural assets available to the Cloud, in order to be able to synthesize, publish and work with a wide selection of relevant data that will form the Heritage Digital Twin (HDT). The Knowledge Graph (KG) offers an efficient, modular, and extensible approach for integrating existing or emerging datasets at both the metadata and data levels. By relying on established standards, such as CIDOC-CRM, it ensures long-term sustainability. Ultimately, this will support the development of the Digital Commons Knowledge Base.

To this end, ECHOES will also provide direct connections and links to other major existing or in progress European initiatives in the Cultural Heritage domain (e.g., the Dataspace for CH, Europeana, EOSC, the Dataspace for Tourism, etc.) in the form or tight integration at the system level, so as to allow their seamless use by any application that uses the Cloud, without the requirement for any additional effort in development. It is foreseen, that access to all these different sources will be handled inside the CHC and in a rather uniform way.

ECHOES will also provide the Single Entry Point (SEP) that will allow everyone to access the resources of ECCCH in different ways. As such, SEP will provide comprehensive catalogues for data and metadata, services and applications and potentially workflows and automation. This will be used by all ECCCH sister projects (i.e. projects funded under the ECCCH calls) to access the platform and share data and services to users of the greater CH community.

We foresee various 6-month-long release cycles, starting with M18 of the project (November 2025). We will make all code and models developed by ECHOES (unless there is a clearly stated exception) available by publishing them to the corresponding GitHub repository with the proper open-source licenses.