Metadata enrichment
The last decades have seen a growing mass of uninterpreted or misinterpreted data related to cultural heritage assets. Innovative methods are needed to achieve a massive production of semantically enriched digital resources in the context of multidisciplinary research and professional activities.

To make cultural heritage content findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR), and facilitate discoverability, digital objects must be tagged with good quality metadata. This raises several issues that need to be considered in the design and use of the ECCCH, such as metadata models for different application domains, vocabularies and ontological structures, multilingualism, efficient interfaces for accessing and managing metadata and paradata, effective implementation and reuse of existing models for heterogeneous applications, as well as sustainable maintenance of metadata as the real world and its conceptualisations evolve over time.

For this use, projects funded under this topic should develop and test innovative tools for human-driven acquisition, categorisation and annotation of digital objects (e.g. texts, images, 3D models, sounds or videos) combined with new AI-based approaches, resulting in high-quality content and metadata. Methods building on citizen science like approaches may also be considered. The tools should foster the emergence of new collaborative data curation scenarios within a multidisciplinary and multisectoral framework. They should further support innovative data interlinkage between cultural heritage objects and related actors, enabling a semi-automatic mutual enrichment process where data are completed and enhanced by detecting and integrating related sources of knowledge.

Embedding scientific and professional value as well as IP and other associated rights throughout the digital content production chain
With the digital transformation of the cultural heritage area, large amounts of digital resources are emerging. However, a considerable part of this data remains inaccessible in private repositories.

The ECCCH should support the transition from massive production of raw data related to activities on cultural heritage objects, to semantically rich and collectively produced digital resources (digital commons). In this context, a key to encourage data sharing is the adequate control of who may use the material created and/or curated, and of how it will be used.

For this use, projects funded under this topic should develop innovative tools and methods to turn the massive digitisation effort into an opportunity to record and share not only the digital resources (with basic metadata), but also the methods and processes that led to their creation (such as human skills, technological and cognitive processes, or scientific protocols). The tools should support cultural heritage researchers and professionals to record the key steps of their activities on cultural heritage objects, ranging from the historical knowledge to the conservation, restoration and dissemination areas. The tools should produce data chains able to represent the complex workflows – often composed of combinations of individual skills and collective decisions – that constitute the creation of digital resources, as well as their progressive enrichment, transformation and re-use. This information should be linked to any data type/data element. The data chains should also embed information for managing ownership and property rights, use rights, and effective re-use of digital resources, in order to enable and encourage contribution to and use of shared repositories. These tools should, to the extent appropriate, be able to deal correctly with the different cases of unclear or contested IPR that may be encountered. The full production and enrichment chain of digital resources should be encoded, as an implicit mechanism to unveil the value chains of multi-actor collaborative productions. Block chains or other methods may be used, able to encode a stream of changes, modifications and re-uses of the digital objects.

In order to encode this information, extensions to the ECCCH data model might be needed. If so, these extensions should be designed in cooperation with the ECCCH main consortium.

Collaboration- and business models based on the multi-actor value chain
Such encoded value chains should enable innovative business models in collaboration with for instance cultural and creative industries. For this use, projects funded under this topic should introduce and experiment with collaboration- and business models for the data objects stored in the ECCCH, as well as the required web-based infrastructure to allow commercial collaborations. Such actions should be subject to the explicit authorisation of the owner institutions, and revenues shared with those institutions, based on the IPR information from the data value chains.

Particularly in the context of sharing and re-use of digital cultural resources, the Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage, as well as the European Open Science Cloud, might be valuable resources. Developments under these initiatives should be taken into account, as appropriate, in order to explore potential synergies and ensure complementarity.