Speaker
Description
The digital transformation of cultural heritage (CH) has accelerated in recent years, driven by the need for advanced tools to preserve, manage, and valorize historical assets. Within this context, INFN Cultural heritage network participated, trough its members, to a set of initiatives aimed at promoting and valorizing digital competences.
Among such initiatives the 4CH project, funded under Horizon 2020, laid the foundation for a European Competence Centre for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage, aiming to harmonize technological solutions and provide a sustainable infrastructure for CH preservation.
A cornerstone of 4CH has been the development of a cloud-native platform, hosted at INFN-CNAF, designed to deliver scalable and secure services to the CH community. This platform leverages container orchestration (Kubernetes) and federated authentication (INDIGO-IAM) to enable interoperability and resilience.
Beyond infrastructure, 4CH demonstrated its societal impact through initiatives such as SUM – Save the Ukrainian Monuments. Launched immediately after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, SUM aimed to safeguard the digital documentation of Ukrainian cultural heritage at risk of destruction.
The operation mobilized vast resources to store high-resolution images, ensuring that descriptions, photographs, and 3D models of monuments and sites remain available for future restoration and reconstruction, exemplifying how digital technologies can mitigate the consequences of armed conflict on cultural assets.
Building on these achievements, the ARTEMIS project represents the next frontier in CH digital services. ARTEMIS introduces digital twins as a transformative approach to heritage conservation, enabling predictive modeling and simulation of degradation processes and disaster impacts. By integrating theoretical knowledge, existing software, and real-time data into a unified framework, ARTEMIS leverages cloud-based technologies to turn standalone applications into interoperable services, paving the way for advanced modeling capabilities that can replace or complement physical interventions.
The talk will summarize the above-mentioned activities, trying to define possible new challenges and collaborations.