New Horizon Europe project will work with museums, heritage sites, researchers and technology partners to test how the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) can support documentation, preservation and access
Athens, Greece, 24 June 2026 – Cultural heritage is not only kept in museum cases, archives or archaeological sites. It is also held in stories, records, images, objects, memories and the ways people connect them across time and place. As more collections become digital, Europe’s cultural heritage sector faces an important challenge: how can this material be documented, linked, preserved and shared in ways that are useful for professionals, researchers, artists and the wider public?
This is the question at the heart of MNEME: A Collaborative Memory Platform for Cultural Heritage, a new Horizon Europe Innovation Action that officially launched with its Kick-Off Meeting on 23–24 June 2026 at Divani Palace Acropolis in Athens, Greece.
MNEME started on 1 June 2026 and will run for 30 months, until 30 November 2028. The project is funded by the European Union under Horizon Europe, with an EU contribution of approximately €4 million under Grant Agreement No. 101285462. It is coordinated by UBITECH and brings together 18 partners from Cyprus, Greece, Spain, Slovenia, Italy and France.
MNEME is designed as a large-scale, user-driven validation of the Cultural Heritage Cloud, being developed by ECHOES. In practice, this means that the project will test, extend and contribute to the wider Cultural Heritage Cloud ecosystem through real-world cultural heritage pilots. MNEME will work in coordination with ECHOES, contributing interoperable workflows, tools, evidence and recommendations back to the ECCCH community.
Over the course of the project, MNEME will work through five pilots in Greece, Spain, Slovenia, Italy and France. These pilots will explore how digital tools can help cultural heritage institutions connect collections, enrich documentation, support preservation work and create new ways for people to access and understand heritage.
The technologies involved include semantic interoperability, which helps different collections and databases “speak the same language”; knowledge graphs, which connect information across objects, places, people and stories; AI-assisted enrichment, which can support the analysis and description of cultural heritage material; 3D capture and AR/VR experiences, which can help people explore heritage in immersive ways; and FAIR data practices, which aim to make digital information findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. MNEME will also follow an open-source approach for its software outputs.
During the two-day Kick-Off Meeting, partners came together to align on the project’s technical roadmap, pilot needs and first implementation steps. The agenda included partner introductions, discussions on the MNEME architecture, stakeholder engagement and co-design planning, pilot requirements workshops, ECCCH/ECHOES onboarding, dissemination and exploitation planning, governance, sustainability and technical coordination.
The meeting also placed strong emphasis on the people who will use and benefit from the project: curators, collection managers, researchers, cultural and creative professionals, artists, educators, local communities and visitors. Through co-design activities and pilot workshops, MNEME aims to ensure that its tools and methods respond to real needs in cultural heritage settings.
Commenting on the launch, Daphne Galani, MNEME Coordinator at UBITECH, said: “MNEME begins from a very practical idea: cultural heritage collections become more powerful when they can be connected, understood and shared across institutions. Through this project, we will work with our partners and with the wider ECCCH and ECHOES community to test how digital tools can support this in real-world heritage environments.”
What happens next
Following the Kick-Off Meeting, the consortium will begin its first phase of work, focused on stakeholder engagement, requirements gathering and co-design. This will include planning regional co-design workshops with pilot sites, defining user and technical requirements, and preparing the first steps towards the MNEME platform, semantic framework and pilot validation activities.
Project Partners
UBITECH, ViLabs, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, Ayuntamiento de Murcia, Celje Regional Museum, Mathema S.r.l., Jožef Stefan Institute, University of Western Macedonia, ITML, Département du Rhône – Musée gallo-romain de Saint-Romain-en-Gal, MetaMind Innovations, OdinS, AKMON S.A., PJP d.o.o., ACCELIGENCE Ltd., Prato Cultura Società Cooperativa, The Centre for Research and Technology Hellas.
