At the second ECHOES annual event in Poznań, Poland on 18 March, Harry Verwayen, General Director of the Europeana Foundation and coordinator of the data space consortium, and Xavier Rodier, director of the Maison des Sciences sociales et des Humanités Val de Loire (CNRS) and ECHOES coordinator, publicly signed a joint commitment to strengthen collaboration between the two initiatives. The statement recognises the complementarity of the common European data space for cultural heritage and the Cultural Heritage Cloud and their mutually reinforcing relationship. It outlines nine concrete commitments to unlock their combined potential.
The common European data space for cultural heritage (‘data space’) is Europe’s public infrastructure to democratise access to high-quality, multilingual cultural heritage data. It makes digital cultural heritage assets and their metadata – source data – easy to share, find, access and reuse. It supports a wide range of professional and personal uses, from education and research to creative industries, tourism, media and AI development, and it acts as a source for other European data spaces. It is funded through the EU's Digital Europe Programme and part of a broader ecosystem of 14 interoperable data spaces in strategic and public interest domains. These data spaces are central to the European Data Strategy, bringing together relevant data infrastructures and governance frameworks to facilitate data sharing and unleash the potential of data for innovation, economy, and society. The data space for cultural heritage builds on the achievements of the Europeana Initiative, politically and financially supported by the European Commission and EU Member States with more than €200 million since its launch in 2008. The data space is supported by an active, democratic community of individuals via the Europeana Network Association and of organisations via the Europeana Aggregators’ Forum. In its development and scaling phase, it is one of the most advanced data spaces to date.
The European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (‘Cultural Heritage Cloud’) is Europe’s collaborative digital infrastructure for research, science and innovation in cultural heritage. It will provide a shared environment allowing seamless access to interlinked and enriched data, applications, services and actors related to a heritage asset. With advanced digital tools and state-of-the-art workflows, the Cloud will enable the creation and analysis of a new generation of semantically rich, collectively produced, digital-holistic representations of any type of heritage assets, named Heritage Digital Twins. Furthermore, the Cloud aims to facilitate collaboration among different actors in the cultural heritage domain - from researchers and heritage professionals to cultural heritage institutions and private enterprises, thereby creating a cohesive community based on shared practices, principles and frameworks for work and exchange, the Digital Commons. The Cloud is funded through Horizon Europe with a total investment of €110 million, making it the programme’s largest investment in a heritage-related initiative. The ECHOES project is currently designing and implementing the Cloud, with Horizon Europe also funding supporting projects aiming at developing additional tools and functionalities and testing them through real-world use cases.
While fulfilling distinct roles and responding to different needs, the data space and the Cultural Heritage Cloud together create added value for the cultural heritage sector and offer tangible benefits for cultural heritage Institutions, professionals, researchers, private enterprises in the field and open data communities.
Jointly, the data space and the Cloud enhance the opportunities for sharing, exploration and transformation of digital heritage at scale, supporting the preservation, understanding, dissemination and valorisation of cultural heritage in Europe. This is fully aligned with EU policy priorities as expressed in the Culture Compass for Europe, the European Data Strategy, the current Horizon Europe Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, and the 2021 European Commission Recommendation on a common European data space for cultural heritage.
The two initiatives have complementary roles to play and the alignment of their goals and priorities, as well as their technical interoperability would allow the cultural heritage community to extract the maximum set of benefits and move towards a new way to work.
For this reason, the data space and the Cloud commit to jointly:
Shared standards and principles
- Uphold interoperable standards between the two initiatives particularly by aligning the Europeana Data Model and the Heritage Digital Twin Ontology.
- Adopt concerted intellectual property rights’ strategies, particularly regarding rights statements for cultural heritage and research data, while supporting and promoting to the largest extent possible open data and open-source principles, in accordance with the EU’s open science policy.
Data management and interoperability
Design workflows that optimise users’ contributions, whether they are cultural heritage institutions, research organisations, cultural and creative industries, individuals working at these organisations, or any other. This aims to help the onboarding of users – through integrated protocols and services - to avoid duplication of efforts, and to improve synergies between local, regional, national, and European initiatives. It includes:
a. Ensuring, as much as possible, that contributors do not have to provide two distinct contributions to the data space and the Cloud, while they would still be able to choose doing so.
b. Ensuring integrated data flows between both initiatives so that data, which can be used in both contexts, can easily be exchanged.
Work on developing, supporting and promoting use cases that demonstrate the synergies, operational collaboration, technical integration and added value of cooperation between data space and the Cloud.
Produce joint publications and technical guidelines on data flows and collaboration workflows to support the creation of new knowledge in the Cloud from data space sources and integrating the results into the data space.
Capacity building and skills
- Develop capacity building resources, implement standardised training development and delivery approaches, and adopt a strategy for alignment to maximise complementarity of efforts and avoid redundancy. This strategy will be shared with other relevant European actors in the field of cultural heritage and Open Science.
- Empower users to adopt new ways of working by providing a clear added value, through common access paths, common interfaces and shared understanding, when using one or both initiatives in their everyday working lives.
Governance, collaboration and joint advocacy
- Establish formal governance links between the two initiatives, including a joint task force, put in place in the summer of 2025. Together, the data space and the Cloud call for other relevant European initiatives to join them in the effort to establish a shared governance of Digital Commons for cultural heritage.
- Promote shared priorities – such as 3D and AI, open science and Europe's digital and cultural sovereignty – and shape future policy together, including contributing to consultations for the next Multiannual Financial Framework of the EU and the upcoming AI Strategy for Culture and Creative Sectors as part of the Culture Compass for Europe.
