ECHOLOT

ECHOLOT develops an interoperability hub for the exchange, collaborative curation, enrichment and reuse of cultural heritage data within the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH). It addresses a persistent problem in the European cultural heritage landscape: large quantities of digitised material are already available through cultural heritage institutions and collaborative knowledge bases such as Wikimedia, but differences in data models, publication practices and institutional capacity continue to limit their discovery and active reuse.

ECHOLOT combines open standards, Semantic Web and Linked Open Data technologies with AI-assisted multimedia annotation, entity linking and reconciliation. Human-in-the-loop workflows support contextual accuracy and quality control, while provenance, intellectual property and rights information remain explicit parts of the resulting data. The project aims to lower the barrier to publishing semantically enriched cultural heritage data to infrastructures including Europeana, the European cultural heritage data space and Wikimedia.

From the perspective of our research agenda, ECHOLOT provides an important implementation environment for interoperability between independently developed cultural heritage knowledge systems. Its combination of semantic reconciliation, AI-assisted enrichment, human review, provenance and rights metadata closely connects practical ECCCH infrastructure development with our research on intermediate representations, human-centred knowledge production and data federation.