OPEN-HERIT
From October 2026 EXARC will lead the project OPEN-HERIT – Open-Air Heritage Documentation and Readiness for ECCCH.
OPEN-HERIT is a capacity-building initiative designed to help small and medium-sized cultural heritage institutions, particularly open-air museums and regional heritage organisations, engage with the Cultural Heritage Cloud being developed by ECHOES (European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage, ECCCH).
Building on the outcomes of the earlier RETOLD project, OPEN-HERIT addresses a significant gap: while many institutions already document historic buildings, traditional crafts, cultural landscapes, intangible heritage, and other heritage assets, they often lack the technical knowledge and organisational capacity needed to align their existing documentation practices with emerging European digital infrastructures, semantic standards, and interoperability frameworks.
Rather than developing new software or digital platforms, the project focuses on practical understanding, capacity building, and realistic pathways towards ECCCH compatibility. Over a 12-month period, the consortium will review and refine the documentation methods developed through RETOLD, identify conceptual and semantic gaps, map selected documentation workflows to ECCCH-relevant standards such as CIDOC CRM and the Heritage Digital Twin Ontology, and produce accessible guidance materials, workshops, training resources, and practical job aids tailored to the needs of under-resourced heritage organisations.
Led by EXARC, with technical expertise provided by REPREX and sectoral outreach through AEOM as well as EXARC, OPEN-HERIT will strengthen documentation quality, improve awareness and adoption of international standards, and enhance the long-term readiness of open-air museums and regional heritage organisations to participate in the Cultural Heritage Cloud ecosystem.
About ECCCH
The Cultural Heritage Cloud or European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) is a European Union initiative to create a shared digital infrastructure that connects cultural heritage institutions and professionals across the EU. It will provide specific digital collaboration tools for the sector while removing barriers for smaller and more remote institutions.
The Cultural Heritage Cloud aims to add a digital dimension to cultural heritage preservation, conservation, restoration, and enhancement by providing cuttingedge technology for artefact digitisation and artwork research. The goal is to assist cultural heritage institutions and research organisations of all sizes, and both professionals and non-professionals, in managing their digital objects more effectively.
The Cultural Heritage Cloud will facilitate this through enhanced visibility, interconnectivity, and access to scientific resources, training, and advanced digital tools.These tools will help them navigate the challenges posed by the digital transition in the cultural heritage sector.
The Cultural Heritage Cloud is being developed by the European Cloud for Heritage OpEn Science (ECHOES), a project funded by the European Commission and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), bringing together fragmented communities in the Cultural Heritage field to form a new, unified community. ECHOES is responsible for coordinating and integrating the outcomes from all projects funded under ECCCH-related calls, including Open-Herit (2026-2027). By adopting a holistic approach, ECHOES will establish a collaborative digital environment for all cultural heritage sector participants, fostering knowledge creation across tangible and intangible heritage assets.
The digital environment created by ECHOES will enable digitising existing knowledge and collaboratively analysing cultural heritage assets, facts, and phenomena. In this context, actors – whether human or Artificial Intelligence – can develop interpretations that enrich the understanding of cultural heritage and its surrounding context.
A core objective is to develop 'Digital Twins' of heritage objects within the Cultural Heritage Cloud. These Digital Twins will integrate multidisciplinary information, enabling users to interact with, explore, and enhance cultural heritage objects in new ways, thus encouraging collaborative, scientifically-informed knowledge creation across the sector.
By 2028, ECHOES will deliver a unified platform integrating the outputs of both EU and national cultural heritage projects. To ensure the Cultural Heritage Cloud’s long-term sustainability, the project will also establish a dedicated legal entity to oversee its continuity and support the sector's evolving digital needs.
For further information and to stay updated on the developments of the Cultural Heritage Cloud visit the dedicated website echoeseccch.eu.
Project Links:
This project has received support through a cascading grant from ECHOES, which is funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement No. 101157364, with the support of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) under the UK Government’s Horizon Europe funding guarantee No. 10110142 and No. 10110466.Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.