Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs) often fail to reflect the complexity and richness of Cultural Heritage Digital Objects (CHDOs), presenting very simple or monolithic representations omitting multidimensional interpretations of CHIs. Collections often remain disconnected, limiting access and collaborative exploration. These challenges underscore the need for robust solutions that prioritize connectivity between collections, improve metadata quality, and foster interoperability, enabling ethical reuse of CHDOs and fostering a holistic understanding of their contexts. Integration with the Data Space for Cultural Heritage (DS4CH) and the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) further supports advanced data enrichment, adds professional value, and facilitates innovative business models in the sector.
The INFINITY project addresses these challenges and expectations by creating tools that enable deep, contextual metadata enrichment for multimodal and digital heritage resources, improving their accessibility and interpretability. Furthermore, the development and implementation of multidimensional knowledge graphs (MKGs) facilitates an in-depth understanding of cultural heritage digital objects (CHDOs) from multiple perspectives, taking into account diverse cultural, historical, and social contexts. The implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies facilitates the ethical (re)use and management of CHDO, ensuring compliance with both legal and social ethical norms. The project also creates interoperable data models that support the seamless integration of INFINITY tools and methods into existing (heritage) infrastructures and collections management systems. CHIs will be supported in implementing and maximizing the benefits of INFINITY innovations through training materials, guidelines, and documentation. INFINITY will also strengthen the network of CH professionals, researchers, technologists, and policymakers through workshops, seminars, and a Financial Support for Third Parties (FSTP) mechanism to promote widespread implementation and knowledge exchange.
Core objectives of the project (ALIGN, CODIFY, ENHANCE, INTEGRATE, INTERACT, ENGAGE) will be confirmed by six real-world use cases that will focus on demonstrating how INFINITY can semantically enrich diverse cultural‑heritage assets, ranging from handwritten documents, historic maps, manuscripts, audio‑visual materials and archival meterials, up to 3D archaeological data, while ensuring provenance, legal compliance and reusable, context‑aware metadata.
Infinity is a project funded by the European Commission under Grant Agreement n.101233051. The views and opinions expressed in this website are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.
Partners: https://infinity-eccch.eu/partners/
