ECHOES aims to create the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) as a shared platform for heritage professionals and researchers to access data, innovative scientific and training resources and advanced digital tools co-developed by the heritage community according to their specific needs. ECHOES will bring together fragmented communities of the Cultural Heritage (CH) field, which consists of various actors from different sectors and disciplines, into a new community around the Digital Commons. Going beyond the strict focus on assets and the mere digitisation of Heritage, ECHOES intends to generate a visionary paradigm shift in the CH field. Adopting a holistic approach, ECHOES will also enable digitising the existing knowledge of Heritage objects, whether tangible or intangible. It will create a digital environment enabling collaborative analysis of CH assets, facts, and phenomena. In this environment, actors – humans or Artificial Intelligence – can develop their interpretations, thereby enriching the knowledge of CH and their surroundings. The digital environment proposed by ECHOES will empower users to interact with, manipulate and enrich Digital Twins, leading to new, jointly developed scientific knowledge. The ECCCH built by ECHOES is anchored in the principles of Open Access and Open Science. It thus promotes inclusion and democratises access to knowledge and digital assets, which are understood as public goods by and for all. This digital environment will allow the creation of a new generation of heritage objects, the Digital Commons, which are semantically rich and collectively produced – we see this as “the heritage of tomorrow”. At the end of the project, ECHOES will deliver a single platform to integrate results of EU and national projects on CH. The ECCCH will be sustainable thanks to its inclusive legal entity, which will be created before the end of ECHOES.

Europe urgently needs to restore and intensify its engagement with its past. Time Machine will give Europe the technology to strengthen its identity against globalisation, populism and increased social exclusion, by turning its history and cultural heritage into a living resource for co-creating its future. The Large Scale Research Initiative (LSRI) will develop a large-scale digitisation and computing infrastructure mapping millennia of European historical and geographical evolution, transforming kilometres of archives, large collections from museums and libraries, and geohistorical datasets into a distributed digital information system. To succeed, a series of fundamental breakthroughs are targeted in Artificial Intelligence and ICT, making Europe the leader in the extraction and analysis of Big Data of the Past. Time Machine will drive Social Sciences and Humanities toward larger problems, allowing new interpretative models to be built on a superior scale. It will bring a new era of open access to sources, where past and on-going research are open science. This constant flux of knowledge will have a profound effect on education, encouraging reflection on long trends and sharpening critical thinking, and will act as an economic motor for new professions, services and products, impacting key sectors of European economy, including ICT, creative industries and tourism, the development of Smart Cities and land use. The CSA will develop a full LSRI proposal around the Time Machine vision. Detailed roadmaps will be prepared, organised around science and technology, operational principles and infrastructure, exploitation avenues and framework conditions. A dissemination programme aims to further strengthen the rapidly growing ecosystem, currently counting 95 research institutions, most prestigious European cultural heritage associations, large enterprises and innovative SMEs, influential business and civil society associations, and international and national institutional bodies.