ITN-DCH · Initial Training Networks for Digital Cultural Heritage: Projecting our Past to the Future

Cultural Heritage (CH) is an integral element of Europe and vital for the creation of a common European identity and one of the greatest assets for steering Europe’s social, economic development and job creation. However, the current research training activities in CH are fragmented and mostly design to be of a single-discipline, failing to cover the whole lifecycle of Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) research, which is by nature a multi-disciplinary and inter-sectoral research agenda.ITN-DCH aims for the first time worldwide that top universities, research centers, industries and CH stakeholders, end-users and standardized bodies will collaborate to train the next generation of researchers in DCH. The project aims to analyze, design, research, develop and validate an innovative multi-disciplinary and inter-sectoral research training framework that covers the whole lifecycle of digital CH research for a cost–effective preservation, documentation, protection and presentation of CH. ITN-DCH targets innovations that covers all aspects of CH ranging from tangible (books, newspapers, images, drawings, manuscripts, uniforms, maps, artefacts, archaeological sites, monuments) to intangible content (e.g., music, performing arts, folklore, theatrical performances) and their inter-relationships. The project aims to boost the added value of CH assets by re-using them in real application environments (protection of CH, education, tourism industry, advertising, fashion, films, music, publishing, video games and TV) through research on (i) new personalized, interactive, mixed and augmented reality enabled e-services, (ii) new recommendations in data acquisition, (iii) new forms of representations (3D/4D) of both tangible /intangible assets and (iv) interoperable metadata forms that allow easy data exchange and archiving.