Knowledge Graphs for Cultural Heritage
The INFINITY project addresses a critical challenge in the cultural heritage sector: while digitization has enabled unprecedented global access to collections, many Cultural Heritage Digital Objects (CHDOs) lack nuanced, multi-contextual metadata. This limits their accessibility, understanding, and ethical reuse. CHDOs often exist in fragmented datasets shaped by disparate perspectives, obscuring the rich cultural, historical, social, legal and ethical dimensions they embody.
INFINITY will transform this landscape by developing multidimensional knowledge graphs (mKGs) and an ecosystem of AI-driven tools within the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH). The project ensures that CHDOs can be represented from multiple interconnected perspectives while upholding rigorous legal and ethical principles, fostering trust and enabling responsible reuse across research, education, and creative industries.
Cultural Heritage Use Cases – From Museums to Creative Industries
The project will validate its innovations through five real-world use cases identified by consortium cultural heritage stakeholders. These use cases encompass large-scale collaborative efforts to enrich metadata across various multimedia assets, including text, images, audio, video and 3D models. They represent CHDO reuse scenarios in both commercial and non-commercial settings, covering a wide range of legal and ethical considerations.
Knowledge graphs will enable these users to capture diverse interpretations of CHDOs, from Indigenous perspectives on spiritual significance to historical context and artistic importance. INFINITY will integrate its capabilities into existing Collection Management Systems through three core technological components:
- Cross-sector Ontology Network supporting diverse cultural, spatial-temporal and socio-political interpretations,
- Multidimensional Knowledge Graphs that interconnect and represent CHDOs from multiple perspectives, and
- Intuitive interfaces that enable interaction with multiple interpretations for users with varying levels of technical expertise.
Connecting Technology, Cultural Institutions and Creative Industries
The consortium, led by the University of Bologna, reflects the project's interdisciplinary nature and commitment to user-centric development. Complementary skills across technology providers, cultural institutions, research organizations and creative industries will ensure that INFINITY's solutions address real-world needs while maintaining the highest standards of cultural sensitivity and technical excellence.
Storypact brings extensive experience in Semantic Web technologies, knowledge extraction, and visual analytics to lead key technical developments. We will develop the multidimensional knowledge graphs, AI-driven metadata enrichment tools, and intuitive visualization interfaces that form the backbone of INFINITY's ecosystem. Storypact's expertise in managing complex, multi-perspective data and creating accessible interfaces for diverse user groups will be crucial for ensuring the ECCCH can achieve its full potential.
Cultural heritage institutions will provide real-world collections and use cases, while research partners contribute expertise in cultural heritage preservation, digital humanities, and ethical AI. Technology partners complement Storypact's capabilities with specialized expertise in areas such as collection management systems, crowdsourcing platforms, and creative-industry workflows.
AI-Driven Metadata Enrichment with Ethical Safeguards
To effectively manage the complexity of cultural heritage, INFINITY develops advanced AI tools that must be both powerful and responsible. While Artificial Intelligence has demonstrated superior capabilities in metadata enrichment tasks such as multilingual comprehension, geolocation alignment, and entity extraction, it must operate within rigorous legal and ethical frameworks.
INFINITY addresses this through a comprehensive approach. The team will develop AI-driven metadata enrichment tools incorporating multilingual knowledge extraction, manuscript transcription, and concept linking. These tools will be enhanced with explainability features to ensure transparency. Additionally, the project will implement IPR encoding and verification mechanisms, alongside ethical validation processes to prevent cultural appropriation and unintended reuse of AI.
For scalable crowdsourcing and citizen science campaigns, INFINITY will provide infrastructure that integrates AI functionalities to enable collaborative multi-context annotation enrichment. This approach captures traditional cultural heritage knowledge at risk of loss and connects it with existing collections, contributing to the concrete realization of digital commons.
INFINITY's knowledge graphs will be FAIR-compliant (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and cross-domain. They will help trace, connect, and contextualize CHDOs throughout their lifecycle. These capabilities will be available as software components, released as both reusable plugin libraries and REST interfaces, for seamless integration with existing systems. The project will also enable new business models by ensuring that IPR rights are recorded and traceable, opening up new economic and sustainability opportunities for cultural and creative industries.
INFINITY Project Overview
Project Start: 01 January 2026
Coordinator: University of Bologna; Project Partners: Storypact, Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena, Stichting Europeana (EF), Stichting Nederlands Instituut Voorbeeld en Geluid (NISV), Time Machine Organisation (TMO), Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Digital Paths SRL, Facts & Files Digital Services GmbH, Italian Ministry of Culture, The University of Edinburgh, The University of Wrocław, EIT Culture & Creativity South West SL
Funding: INFINITY has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No. 101233051.