Data for Cultural Heritage (DIGITAL-2022-CULTURAL-02)

Please see the call document for detailed information. 

Expected outcome and Deliverables

• Facilitate the digital transformation of the cultural sector and capacity building, enabling a pan-European innovative data platform infrastructure with easy online access to European cultural content.
• High-value datasets available for re-use, in particular 3D datasets, including for conducting scientific research, preservation and restoration purposes, re-use by the cultural and creative sector
• Allow stakeholders of the wider cultural sector to further enlarge, use and benefit from this data space.
• Numerous digital opportunities for the public, ranging from virtual visits to museums, libraries, galleries and heritage sites to history reconstruction and education;

 Objective

This action will create the European common data space for cultural heritage, a new flagship initiative to provide support to the digital transformation of Europe’s cultural sector, and foster the creation and reuse of content in cultural and creative sectors. It will build on the current Europeana platform and will vastly expand the current functionalities, in particular in relation to 3D digitisation, re-use of digitised cultural resources as well as cross-sector and cross-border cooperation. The project will also build on the current Europeana Strategy 2020-2025.

The objective is the creation of a technical infrastructure combined with governance mechanisms that will secure easy, cross-border access to key datasets in the targeted area. The projects will have to deploy trust mechanisms (security and privacy by design), data services which ensure the identity of source and receiver of data and which ensure the access and usage rights towards the data.

Scope

Grants will focus on the digital capacity building in the cultural sector for its digital transformation and re-use of data, particularly at national level across Member States. Projects will cover one of the following activities:

• enriching the offer of services available on the data space, such as access to high quality and high value datasets, technological tools, technical know-how references, tools for knowledge sharing, consultancy and other services, to support digitisation, preservation and online sharing of digital cultural heritage assets.
• using existing Artificial Intelligence and machine-learning systems to improve user-engagement and experience, such as for the automatic translation of content or automatic metadata enrichment, improving multilingual aspects, providing adaptive filtering of cultural heritage assets or personalised recommendations;
• fostering the potential of re-use of, in particular, 3D digitised cultural heritage assets in important domains such as education, social sciences and humanities, tourism and the wider cultural and creative sector.

Specific Objective 2 of the Digital Europe Programme aims to reinforce the EU’s core Artificial Intelligence (AI) capacities as a crucial driver for the digital transformation of the public and private sectors. The EU data strategy 2018 outlined the importance of building a thriving ecosystem of private actors to generate economic and societal value from data, while preserving high privacy, security, safety and ethical standards. It announced that the Commission will invest in a High Impact Project that will fund infrastructures, data-sharing tools, architectures and governance mechanisms for thriving data-sharing and Artificial Intelligence ecosystems. To reach these objectives, three main interlinked work strands are foreseen in the first two years of implementation of the Digital Europe Programme:

• The deployment of cloud-to-edge infrastructure and services compliant with EU rules, notably on security, data protection and privacy and environmental aspects. Open-source by default, they will ensure fluid data flows. Completing the picture, the deployment of the Testing and Experimentation Facility for edge-AI will support the green transition with support to advanced low-power computing technologies. Such facility should be a role model in showing effective ways to comply with existing legislation, and taking into account relevant codes of conduct and guidelines.
• The deployment of a Data for EU strand with a focus on building common data spaces, based on the above federated cloud-to-edge infrastructure and services that are accessible to businesses and the public sector across the EU. The objective is the creation of data infrastructure with tailored governance mechanisms that will enable secure and cross-border access to key datasets in the targeted thematic areas. Focus will be on data spaces for Green deal, smart communities, mobility, manufacturing, agriculture, cultural heritage, health, media, skills, language technologies, financial sector, public administrations and tourism. Data spaces will be supported by a Data Space Support Centre in order to guarantee coordination between the various initiatives and guarantee that data could be accessed across different sectors. The centre will ensure the best use of the cloud-to-edge infrastructure and services to serve the needs of these data spaces.
• The deployment of AI reference testing and experimentation facilities with a focus on four prioritized application sectors (i.e. health, smart communities, manufacturing, and agriculture)19 . These facilities will provide common, highly specialised resources to be shared at European level. In addition, the AI-on-demand platform will be consolidated as a catalogue of AI-based resources and marketplace, for trustworthy AI tools made in Europe for both private and public sector use.

The participation is open to all eligible entities as established by Article 18 of the Digital Europe Programme, in particular public sector as well as private sector organisations including SMEs and NGOs.

All topics under this section are subject to the provisions of Article 12(6) of the Digital Europe Programme Regulation. The topics under Specific Objective 2 are closely interconnected within each area of intervention (for example, individual Testing and Experimentation Facilities (TEFs) benefit from common AI tools) as well as between the three intervention areas (for example, Artificial Intelligence is closely linked to the EU data and cloud initiatives, while the data spaces will provide a major source of data for AI-based applications and development as well as links to critical infrastructures, which must operate securely). These links require that the approach towards Article 12(6) must be systematic, i.e. it must take into account not only situations where given action is sensitive from the perspective of the security interest of the Union in itself, but also when it can affect the sensitivity of other actions. The reasoning per intervention area is reflected in sections 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 respectively.