European Cultural Heritage (CH) is a crucial resource that must be maintained, preserved and accessible, to counteract degradation enhanced by unfavorable environmental conditions and climate changes. Conservation methodologies lack durability, sustainability and cost-effectiveness, and are typically based on energy-consuming processes or non-environmentally friendly materials. Coping with these issues, GREENART proposes new solutions based on green and sustainable materials and methods, to preserve, conserve and restore CH: 1) Protective coatings based on green materials from waste and plant proteins, with self-healing and reversibility character, possibly functionalized with organic/inorganic nanoparticles to impart VOC capture, anti-corrosion and barrier behaviors. 2) Foams and packaging materials made by biodegradable/compostable polymers from renewable sources (polyurethanes and natural fibers) to control T/RH. 3) Consolidants based on natural polymers from renewable sources, to mechanically strengthen weak artifacts. 4) Gels and cleaning fluids inspired by the most advanced systems currently available to conservators, improving them according to green and circular economy. 5) Green tech solutions for monitoring CH assets non-invasively against pollutants and environmental oscillations. Life cycle Assessment and modeling will favor the “safe-by-design” creation of affordable solutions safe to craftspeople, operators and the environment, and minimize energy-consumption in monitoring museum environments. Such holistic approach is granted in GREENART by a multidisciplinary partnership that gathers hard and soft sciences and engineering, including academic centers, innovative industries and SMEs, conservation institutions and professionals, museums whose collections hold absolute masterpieces in need of conservation, public entities and policy makers. The latter will favour training and dissemination activities to make stakeholders familiar with the new methods.

SHIFT is strategically conceived to deliver a set of loosely coupled, technological tools, that offers cultural heritage institutions the necessary impetus to stimulate growth, and embrace the latest innovations in artificial intelligence, machine learning, multi-modal data processing, digital content transformation methodologies, semantic representation, linguistic analysis of historical records, and the use of haptics interfaces to effectively and efficiently communicate new experiences to all citizens (including people with disabilities). The development of SHIFT tools will be carried out in close consultation with the stakeholder communities represented in the project. The two CH networks (BMN, ANBPR) will launch open consultation to aggregate views from their members, while together with the cultural heritage institutions (SOMKL, SMB) and heritage professionals (Heritage Management), will provide requirements based on the cultural assets being maintained within each organisation. The diversity of digital media transformation and the semantic formalisation of the cultural assets will be individually demonstrated across each museum and library. Additionally, the inclusion by design principles adopted within the project, will be evaluated by CH networks and vulnerable group partner (DBSV), who will engage with the various tools developed in the project. In complementary to the stakeholders and end-users, the SHIFT project also brings together leading industrial (SIMAVI) and academic institutions (FORTH, UAU, QMUL). The consortium is complemented by SMEs (MDS, AUD) with high-tech product development teams and ethical expertise (ERC). Collectively, the project will release 12 technology solutions clustered into five thematic areas (computer vision, audio, text-to-speech, haptics, semantics and linguistics) that support accessibility and inclusion by design to overcome the shortcomings and limitations of CCI sector to enable growth and stimulation.

Artifacts are constantly threatened by anthropogenic actions. Looting, smuggling, and illicit trade of cultural goods pose major risks to our cultural goods and our cultural identity. One of the major consequences of these illegal activities is the dissociation, meaning the loss of information associated with an object, such as provenance, identification, or location information, without which the object loses significance or is lost. Thus, art property marking and tracking are crucial to ensure the object identification, collection management and protection, while maintaining their state of conservation. Several actions have been adopted during the years to strengthen the protection of cultural property and cultural heritage, but they often lack effectiveness. The AURORA project wants to fill this gap by demonstrating how chemical marking, miniaturized device, art deep-scan technique, cloud and blockchain based platforms can be combined to create a cost-effective, non-destructive, and non-invasive countermeasure against illegal activities while preserving artifacts. The technologies researched and implemented in AURORA will converge in a digital tool allowing relevant stakeholders, art dealers, curators, auction houses, logistic services, and enforcement agents, to easily verify artwork authenticity and provenance, enabling art piece movement tracking. In close collaboration with relevant cultural institutions partners, AURORA will showcase real setting applications to validate the non-invasiveness, low cost, long-term stability, confidentiality, and data security features of the proposed solutions. In parallel, AURORA will foster technological democratization among cultural institutions, by creating a knowledge bridge between technical competencies and cultural heritage professionals. Specific awareness-raising activities will demonstrate how the AURORA solutions can be a means to preserve cultural identities mixtures through cultural heritage preservation.

The ARIADNEplus project is the extension of the previous ARIADNE Integrating Activity, which successfully integrated archaeological data infrastructures in Europe, indexing in its registry about 2.000.000 datasets. ARIADNEplus will build on the ARIADNE results, extending and supporting the research community that the previous project created and further developing the relationships with key stakeholders such as the most important European archaeological associations, researchers, heritage professionals, national heritage agencies and so on. The new enlarged partnership of ARIADNEplus covers all of Europe. It now includes leaders in different archaeological domains like palaeoanthropology, bioarchaeology and environmental archaeology as well as other sectors of archaeological sciences, including all periods of human presence from the appearance of hominids to present times. Transnational Activities together with the planned training will further reinforce the presence of ARIADNEplus as a key actor. The technology underlying the project is state-of-art. The ARIADNEplus data infrastructure will be embedded in a cloud that will offer the availability of Virtual Research Environments where data-based archaeological research may be carried out. The project will furthermore develop a Linked Data approach to data discovery. Innovative services will be made available to users, such as visualization, annotation, text mining and geo-temporal data management. Innovative pilots will be developed to test and demonstrate the innovation potential of the ARIADNEplus approach. Fostering innovation will be a key aspect of the project, with dedicated activities led by the project Innovation Manager.