The 4CH project will design and prepare for a European Competence Centre (CC) on the Conservation of Cultural Heritage which will work proactively for the preservation and conservation of cultural heritage (CH). The project aims to start implementing the structure, organization and services of the CC which will operate as a virtual infrastructure providing expertise, advice and services using state-of-the-art ICT with a special focus on 3D technology. A Strategic Advisory Board, including representatives of major national and international CH bodies, will be established to advise on cultural, scientific, technological, financial, strategy and policy areas. 4CH will design and implement the ICT infrastructure of the CC, based on a Cultural Heritage Cloud, compliant with the EOSC vision, to provide an open collaborative digital space for cultural heritage conservation giving access to repositories of data, metadata, standards and guidelines. Access to High Performance Computing service providers will be supported. The core results of 4CH work will comprise of: • a holistic interdisciplinary approach to state-of-the-art 3D documentation of monuments and sites for conservation, preservation, access and exploitation • guidance on policies and strategies • a catalogue of well-documented standards • an inventory of software and tools • guidelines for data acquisition, management and storage • a set of success stories on advanced digitization • advice on funding opportunities • training and education plans for professionals and managers • communication and dissemination of 4CH results • a complete business model and a sustainability plan for the Competence Centre. 4CH will foster the implementation of actions to substantially increase the number and the quality of digitized sites, documents and monuments.

The ARTEMIS proposal addresses the field of cultural heritage conservation, restoration, safeguard and valorisation by advanced digital technologies, using digital twins and relying on advanced AR/VR technologies. It relies on an extended digital documentation of heritage assets with 3D models incorporated in their digital twins, by implementing services on heritage data that model the behaviour of the real-world assets in different conditions and under the effect of complex external phenomena. The same approach will allow digital experiments testing the effect of activities simulated on the twin. Whenever suitable, the developed services will avail of AR/VR techniques to manage the simulation input and to visualize the outcomes. ARTEMIS will rely on the know-how of participating world-class research infrastructures, making available a huge amount of heritage documentation data, on the contribution of advanced research centres and on the support of specialized technological SMEs. The project will produce a scientific methodology tested on a large number of pilots and will pave the way for innovative applications in heritage research based on digital twins and AR/VR techniques.