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Découvrir Horizon Europe pour les primo-accédants
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ExpectedOutcome:
Projects should contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:
Scope:
This topic aims at designing and establishing a European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) and demonstrating its basic capacities.
The cultural heritage sector is in the middle of a digital transition: digital technologies are revolutionising existing workflows, procedures and practices. To support this transition and further enhance research and innovation collaboration and activities in the field, the action should extend and improve the availability of sophisticated digital instruments and provide a platform for data exchange and collaboration to the cultural heritage sector. It should fulfil the requirements of the practitioners in the field by being inclusive, collaborative, interactive, safe, fidelity- and equality-based, and providing open access.
The overall goal is to define, extend and accelerate the development of a platform for multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral collaboration on cultural heritage, focusing on users’ requirements and ease of use, as well as underpinning an open digital ecosystem that provides the tools and services needed to enable and scale-up future research and innovation in the field.
The initial focus is on the design and implementation of the basic architecture and governance of the ECCCH. The design and implementation of the ECCCH should be driven by the needs of its users: The professionals with various disciplinary background working on cultural heritage and in related sectors. The governance body of the effort therefore should include a wide representation from the European cultural heritage sector, research organisations, other related initiatives and from Member States and Associated Countries (see further below).
The project should:
Controlled use of data is an important goal. Thus, the ECCCH should support authentication (single user/groups of users), identification of ownership, data rights and traceability of modifications (creation of derived data), data quality/fidelity information, and data security facilities. Technologies enabling access and use from geographic areas with low-performance network connections should be provided. The system should allow national communities/institutions to link and potentially configure their own local clouds in case this is necessary.
The project should build an inventory of previously funded EU and national initiatives and existing digital resources in areas relevant to the ECCCH, such as for instance EOSC, the Data Space, Europeana or Gaia-X, establish a comprehensive gap analysis and identify the outputs or resources that could be incorporated in, connected to or facilitate interoperability with the ECCCH, with a view to build on previous investments and already available initiatives.
The proposed open source platform should:
Demonstrating successfully a selection of essential tools enabling collaborative research and innovation activities of users within the ECCCH that can also serve as good-practice examples for the development of additional professional tools needed for the sustainable functioning of the platform, e.g.:
All basic infrastructure components should be provided as open-source, with proper documentation and training material to enable other consortia to cooperatively contribute data and tools to the cloud platform, according to the principle of an extensible and evolutionary design of the cloud. The good practice proposed for software documentation should become a reference for other project consortia under topics promoted in future ECCCH calls.
The ECCCH governance should follow basic requirements. In concrete terms, it should be structured and defined around the following needs: data security, scalability, technical robustness, technical and economic sustainability, independent usability evaluation and long-term assessments, networking, training and community building.[5] To this end, the governance should include a legal entity with a Single Entry Point (SEP), as well as an independent external advisory board. The governance should be properly documented.
The governance body should include representative stakeholders of existing communities and cultural heritage institutions, potentially involving coordinators of other actions funded under the ECCCH calls and, where appropriate, relevant actions funded under the Digital Europe Programme, such as the Data Space. Furthermore, the governance body should ensure the engagement of appropriate representatives of a wide range of Member States and Associated Countries, as well as of related EU initiatives.
The governance body should:
The proposal should set out active links and coordination with projects funded under the call HORIZON-CL2-2023-HERITAGE-ECCCH-01, and if appropriate also with relevant projects funded under the Digital Europe programme, to take part in common technical coordination activities, and with a view to ensure synergies with current and previous activities in the field. It is expected to provide clear guidelines and technical support on how the deliverables developed by subsequent projects should be designed and implemented, with the goal of ensuring a proper integration in the ECCCH platform. Therefore, the proposal is expected to include a budget for the attendance to regular joint meetings and may consider to cover the costs of any other joint activities without the prerequisite to detail concrete joint activities at this stage. The Commission may take on the role of facilitator for networking and exchanges, including with additional relevant stakeholders, if appropriate.
The proposal should also set up and manage a common ECCCH website, where all projects funded under the ECCCH calls should be granted space. It is critical that any interested party from the EU or Associated Countries can access the ECCCH at fair conditions and pricing and with transparent and mutual obligations with regards to, for instance, security, safety and intellectual property rights. This should include the promotion of examples of collaborative work in representative application areas that relate to a large part of the cultural heritage sector.
Beneficiaries may provide financial support to third parties, in particular cultural heritage institutions with regional or local scope or mandate, in view of promoting the take-up of tools and methodologies as well as for demonstrating and validating the relevant use cases through experiments. The financial support to third parties can only be provided in the form of grants. A maximum of 10% of the budget is expected to be dedicated to financial support to third parties.
The Commission estimates that a project duration of approximately 5 years is appropriate for the project funded under this topic, in order to ensure that results from future ECCCH actions can be properly incorporated.
Please also refer to the Destination introduction text to consider some key characteristics of the vision for the ECCCH.
[1]See further: https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/other/guides_for_applicants/h2020-im-ac-innotestbeds-18-20_en.pdf and https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/single-entry-point
[2]In the context of this topic, cultural heritage objects or artefacts should be understood as any form of cultural heritage that can be represented in a digital format: tangible, intangible, born digital, etc.
[3]In line with the European Commission action plan against trafficking in cultural goods: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/13352-Trafficking-in-cultural-goods-EU-action-plan_en.
[4]Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable
[5]See European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Brunet, P., De Luca, L., Hyvönen, E., et al., Report on a European collaborative cloud for cultural heritage : ex – ante impact assessment, 2022, Executive summary, p. 5, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/64014