ECHOLOT · European Cultural Heritage Optimised Linked Open Tools

In support of the development and adoption of ECCCH by Cultural Heritage Professionals and Researchers (CHPR), ECHOLOT will make the creation, provision, and reuse of high-quality, semantically rich, and interoperable Cultural Heritage (CH) data accessible to scholars and institutions, significantly lowering the threshold for joining the collaborative cloud.ECHOLOT will address the fundamental issue that, while ever larger amounts of diverse CH data are available through CH institutions (CHIs), the active reuse of this data especially in research and the creative sectors, is hampered by poor quality and lack of interoperability.It will achieve this by seamlessly integrating as a core service in the ECCCH that enables the quality curation and enrichment of CH data, including multimedia, through AI-enhanced workflows combining automated processing and human input. Moreover, it will natively support embedding rights metadata and chain-of-production provenance, thereby preserving the value and integrity of CH datasets.ECHOLOT will serve as an interoperability hub facilitating the exchange of CH data between systems. It will enable CHPRs to publish simultaneously to aggregators, such as Europeana, and open knowledge platforms from the Wikimedia ecosystem, as well as contribute to ECCCH and Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage (DS4CH).Together, these technical innovations will revolutionise CHPR practices and increase the availability of CH data for reuse and collaboration across institutional and sectoral boundaries. ECHOLOT’s solutions will be validated and tested in five case studies presenting a wide spectrum of CH actors. Maximising the adoption of ECHOLOT and ECCCH will be enabled by social and organisational change measures, including innovative business models co-created with relevant stakeholders. Training resources, interactive workshops and open source software best practices will further support capacity building and long-term sustainability.