The ECHOLOT (European Cultural Heritage Optimised Linked Open Tools) project, funded by the European Union, supports the development and adoption of the European Cultural Heritage Cloud (ECCCH) digital infrastructure by researchers and institutions across Europe.
ECHOLOT’s open-source software will enable the preservation and enrichment of cultural heritage data through artificial intelligence, combining automated processing with human input. It will also facilitate the simultaneous publication of high-quality, semantically rich and interoperable data by aggregators such as Europeana and the European Common Heritage Data Space, as well as citizen science platforms within the Wikimedia ecosystem.
The ECHOLOT Consortium is multidisciplinary and comprises partners from 12 European countries: TIB – Leibniz-Informationszentrum Technik und Naturwissenschaften und Universitätsbibliothek, DARIAH ERIC, Ústav pro českou literaturu Akademie věd ČR, Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH), Europeana, Poznańskie Centrum Superkomputerowo-Sieciowe, Jozef Stefan Institute, University of the Basque Country, Professional Wiki, KM-A Knowledge Management, University of Helsinki, meemoo, Flemish Institute for Archives, Takin.solutions, AUSTRALO Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities.
As part of the ECHOLOT project, the University of the Basque Country is leading the real-world case study “Basque Cultural Heritage Data”, which aims to create the first comprehensive collection of identifiers for individuals and entities relevant to Basque cultural heritage, linking textual entity descriptors from heterogeneous datasets across the Basque territories (ES, FR) and the diaspora (USA).
The Basque cultural heritage institutions collaborating as third parties in the project and contributing data and digital objects to ECHOLOT are: the Sancho el Sabio Vital Foundation, with its catalogues of Basque bibliography and Basque authors; Medialab Tabakalera, with its collections and digital content related to art, culture and contemporary creation; UEU Udako Euskal Unibertsitatea, with the Inguma database, which compiles texts, articles, papers and doctoral theses produced by the Basque-speaking scientific community; Wikimedia Euskadi, responsible for developing Wikipedia and related projects of the Wikimedia Foundation in Basque; and Hitz Zentroa, a multidisciplinary research centre specialising in language-centred artificial intelligence promoted by the University of the Basque Country (EHU), which is notable for the development of the Basque language model ‘Latxa’.
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