Digitally preserving Europe's cultural heritage

How can Europe's diverse cultural heritage be made digitally accessible and what efforts are needed to secure and utilise digital cultural heritage in the long term? The "3DBigDataSpace" project on behalf of the European Commission revolves around these questions. The ambitious goal is to secure the large number of monuments and cultural objects that have now been digitised in three dimensions and make them accessible throughout Europe. The team led by Prof. Dr Sander Münster, Junior Professor of Digital Humanities at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, is directly involved. "We want to map this treasure trove of data and make it usable as a standardised European digital infrastructure for the European data space for cultural heritage that is currently being established," says Sander Münster. The project, which has just been launched, will run until mid-2026 and is being funded with almost two million euros.

Virtual journeys through time and space are possible

The potential applications for 3D digital copies are immense. For example, historical buildings can be explored virtually in 3D using VR glasses or a smartphone. Or take a virtual journey through time with the help of historical reconstructions. Tourists visiting Jena, for example, could also relive places that are no longer preserved. Even a simple tour of the city could become an exciting journey through three-dimensional spaces, says Sander Münster. Numerous cultural sites are already available digitally in 3D, mentions Prof. Münster. The problem is that the data sets are stored on different servers and are not standardised and usually insufficiently catalogued. This makes it difficult to utilise them. The first step is therefore to digitise and store 3D content in existing data pools. "We are using Zenodo, which is operated as a European research data repository by CERN in Switzerland," says Sander Münster.

The project is being coordinated by the Time Machine Organisation (TMO), an international alliance consisting of over 700 partners from the cultural and technology sectors, including Prof. Münster's team in Jena. The participants are working together to develop an open, digital "Time Machine" - an immersive digital mirror world in which History can be experienced dynamically in time and space. The TMO drives innovation in digital cultural heritage and promotes interdisciplinary research and strategies that focus on spatio-temporal data to strengthen access to historical resources and their reusability. With this in mind, the TMO is using the "3DBigDataSpace" project to help close gaps in the existing data pool, for example when missing keywords make it difficult to identify the object. "In order to close such gaps, we are developing various digital tools that can enrich such information from different data sources and using artificial intelligence," says Sander Münster. The aim is to digitally visualise, for example, pilgrimage routes such as the Way of St. James that are no longer preserved. There are many ideas for other uses of the data sets. For example, the content is also to be used in museum school projects and make knowledge about historical craftsmanship tangible.

One aspect of the project that should not be neglected is that a dedicated European data infrastructure will allow the project to emancipate itself from foreign providers and purely commercially oriented platforms and thus guarantee long-term data access, emphasises Sander Münster.