The European Cloud for Heritage Open Science (ECHOES) project aims to establish the Cultural Heritage Cloud (or European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage -ECCCH), a shared platform to provide heritage professionals and researchers with access to data, scientific resources, training, and advanced digital tools tailored to suit their needs.

Funded by the European Commission and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), ECHOES will bring together fragmented communities of the Cultural Heritage field into a new community.

The project will benefit the research community by surpassing basic digitisation, aiming to spark a transformation in the field through a holistic approach. It will integrate existing knowledge about tangible and intangible heritage artefacts, creating a collaborative digital environment for analysing heritage assets, facts, and phenomena.

The objectives of ECHOES are as follows:

• Create an open-source infrastructure that will allow the creation of practical applications driven by the needs of heritage professionals, both for their tangible and intangible assets.
• Design a sustainable, open and evolving legal entity to handle the development, implementation and maintenance of the platform.
• Create a community that includes all heritage stakeholders and guides the development of the infrastructure.
• Integrate past, current and future European projects in the field of cultural heritage.
• Enable and promote innovative, collaborative new knowledge creation around new Digital Commons.

The main role of GRNET as an affiliated entity of EGI for the needs of the project, concerns the Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI) that utilises the EGI Check-in service to allow secure access to data available in the CH cloud.

The project is funded from the HORIZON Innovation Actions (IA) of the Horizon Europe Framework Programme.