For decades, Europe’s digital cultural heritage landscape has remained highly fragmented. While we have witnessed numerous of brilliant digitization efforts and localized projects, these initiatives historically functioned with minimal interoperability and no centralized, shared infrastructure. The European Commission’s direct answer to this structural isolation is the creation of the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH).
EXCALIBUR’s Work Package 2 (WP2), formally titled “ECCCH ecosystem collaboration and clustering,” is led by CERTH and runs continuously from Month 1 to Month 42. This work package is dedicated to onboarding the project’s efforts, ensuring EXCALIBUR remains deeply wired into the ECCCH as we actively co-build this strategic ecosystem.
The Revolutionary Shift to Shared Infrastructure
The ECCCH acts as a digital European cultural heritage collaborative space designed to enable an unprecedented level of lasting collaboration among public and private players. At the operational core of this cloud sits the ECHOES project, which is responsible for building the actual infrastructure, platforms, and shared libraries that the rest of the ecosystem will use.
This transition is particularly revolutionary for specialists working specifically with burial heritage, a highly complex domain dealing with 3D tomb structures, intricate artifacts, and highly sensitive human remains. Instead of locking away volumetric CT-scans, digital twins, and bioarcheological metadata on isolated institutional hard drives, professionals can now integrate them into a unified, secure, and standardized European framework.
EXCALIBUR Four Collaboration Pillars
To achieve strategic alignment with the ECCCH ecosystem, EXCALIBUR’s WP2 will structure its clustering and collaboration activities around four complementary pillars. These pillars will guide the project’s engagement with ECHOES, ECCCH sister projects, and wider cultural heritage stakeholders throughout the project lifecycle, ensuring that EXCALIBUR contributes not only as a user of the Cloud, but also as an active co-builder of its tools, practices, and shared knowledge base. Thus, EXCALIBUR will develop clustering activities with ECCCH sister projects through a time-based collaboration plan structured around four pillars:
- Pillar 1 – Ecosystem Initiation and Knowledge Exchange: EXCALIBUR will participate in activities that promote continuous knowledge exchange among ECCCH ecosystem partners.
- Pillar 2 – Technical Alignment with ECCCH infrastructure: EXCALIBUR will engage in activities that ensure the technical alignment with the ECCCH ecosystem and ECHOES infrastructure
- Pillar 3 – Governance and Policy Coordination: EXCALIBUR will contribute to governance and policy coordination by participating in advisory boards, consultation sessions and ECCCH forums, representing the perspectives, challenges and needs of the burial heritage domain.
- Pillar 4 – Communication and Dissemination activity: EXCALIBUR communication & dissemination strategy includes strengthening ECCCH’s visibility and thus contributing to strengthening ECCCH’s impact on the wide spectrum of cultural heritage professionals
Multiplying Impact Through Technical Alignment
EXCALIBUR does not simply use ECCCH; but aims to actively help build and enrich it through a two-way collaboration where we contribute new tools and knowledge back to the shared libraries. By developing toolkits using standardized APIs and data exchange protocols, we expand the existing libraries to handle complex, heterogeneous datasets specific to burial contexts that did not previously exist in the ecosystem. This technical alignment ensures that workflows for analyzing human remains or tomb decorations become reusable, open-source assets available to any future European project.
Looking Ahead
Through WP2, EXCALIBUR will ensure that its results are not developed in isolation but actively connected to the wider ECCCH ecosystem. By fostering collaboration with ECHOES, sister projects, and cultural heritage stakeholders, WP2 will support knowledge exchange, technical alignment, common activities, and greater visibility for the project’s outputs. Ultimately, this work will help transform EXCALIBUR’s burial heritage expertise into reusable tools, shared practices, and long-term contributions to Europe’s emerging Cultural Heritage Cloud.