Creating, enriching and refining annotated bibliographies
A crucial task in both education and professional duties within cultural heritage is compiling bibliographies. This time-consuming activity entails gathering relevant literature on a cultural heritage object, entering bibliographic references in a list, assessing each document, and producing notes that are subsequently saved in the bibliography. This work has a value of its own, not only as part of the papers or reports created. Bibliographies therefore ought to be kept on the ECCCH, made accessible, and further enriched, refined and extended by collaborative and supervised efforts.

For this use, projects funded under this topic should make sure that the ECCCH offers tools that automate much of the tedious tasks, and support cooperative work and re-use. Existing tools and bibliographic frameworks should be evaluated and when appropriate built upon. The tools to be developed should offer significant added value to its users beyond what is currently available, and should be developed based on the data model of the ECCCH, gathering data from and incorporating data in the ECCCH. These tools may, to the extent feasible, include functionality to parse and enrich data from for instance retrodigitised sources not readily machine readable. Given a topic or a specific heritage object and/or a small initial set of papers selected by the user, enhanced AI technologies working on text or/and on images should be able to retrieve related works, evaluate the fit of a given paper with the subject of the research, and produce a preliminary bibliography. The authoring system should support the creation, editing, and annotation of bibliographies. It should be possible to define with whom the results are shared (e.g. with a restricted group of professionals or with all users).

Documenting the results of fieldwork such as archaeological or paleontological excavations or other collection processes and studies
Fieldwork such as archaeological or paleontological exploration and research typically produce large amounts of different kinds of data, such as survey documentation and documents presenting, narrating and interpreting the findings, photographic data, 3D models, drawings, maps and geographic information system data. At a later stage, most of the findings become assets for cultural heritage institutions such as museums. Such activities (excavation, study, etc.), thus, are a crucial phase of the musealisation process. Moreover, most countries enforce legal obligations regarding the archiving of data produced by excavations, as well as periodic reports.

For this use, projects funded under this topic should offer a set of tools that makes the ECCCH a valuable resource for the community involved in such excavations and studies, using an extensible data model based on semantic technology, as well as a repository for the produced data, together with appropriate data visualisation and analysis instruments. Regulated reporting and archiving obligations in different countries should be analysed, and to the extent possible semi-automatised.

Ontologies and vocabularies should be extended as needed to define the data structures and relationships between different data, in view of achieving interoperability. Repositories from different institutions and countries should be inter-operable and inter-connected. The semantic information layer should make it possible for AI technologies to access and “learn” from the archive. An extension to the ECCCH 3D browser should provide an interactive and visual interface to excavation data, and to the related findings.

With a view to use resources efficiently and go beyond the state of the art, projects funded under this topic should, where appropriate, build on previous existing research, methods and solutions. Proposals should therefore ensure that existing tools and methods and their potential (re-)use are properly examined.

Ease of use for the target users is of paramount importance. Therefore, tools and methods should be developed in close collaboration with actively involved representative target users. Furthermore, tools and methods should be thoroughly tested and verified with a significant number of users before the end of the project. Financial support to third parties may be used to facilitate the engagement with users. The financial support to third parties can only be provided in the form of grants.

In order to facilitate the access for less well-equipped users, the developed software tools should to the extent possible be accessible online without requiring installation nor special or particularly powerful equipment. Also, the developed software tools should to the extent appropriate be designed to allow use and avoid loss of work in situations with unstable or limited connectivity.

Projects funded under this topic should demonstrate the potential of the developed tools and methods through representative case studies, conducted in collaboration with relevant users.