19th International CODATA Conference
Category: Plenary - Data and Society

Towards a Web of Culture and Science

Simone Rieger (rieger@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de)
Project "European Cultural Heritage Online" (ECHO), Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany
echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de

The European Cultural Heritage Online initiative (ECHO), fostered by thre Max Planck Society and funded by the European Commission, has created an open-access infrastructure to bring cultural heritage online.

The ECHO initiative has been motivated by the observation that, at present, information relevant to cultural heritage still plays only a marginal role in the Internet. The basic idea of the ECHO initiative therefore is to establish an open-source culture of public and scholarly access to cultural heritage on the Internet. This idea comprises the promotion of content-driven technology in information management. The aim was to create an "Agora," a community of producers and users of culturally relevant information, who are willing to freely exchange such information in order to build a common infrastructure.

ECHO together with the Max Planck Society initiated an Open Access Initiative, and the promotion of the "Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities," which was signed already by more the 30 national and international research and funding organisations.

The open-access infrastructure envisaged by ECHO was realized with paradigmatic and freely accessible "seed collections" (http://echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de). These seed collections offer substantial aggregation of sources pertaining to cultural heritage with an inherent potential to grow with self-sustaining dynamics. This infrastructure should enable every cultural, educational or scholarly institution to make their sources available online with little effort and in a way that guarantees their interoperability with other elements of European cultural heritage.

The long-term vision of ECHO includes a new perspective on the ways in which electronically represented sources of cultural heritage can be explored from a scholarly point of view, eventually overcoming traditional, medium-specific boundaries between disciplines in favour of an overarching study of the underlying cultural worlds. The vision comprises the expectation that a content-driven innovation of information technology will provide a new driving force for technological development in Europe."