Project summary

The combination of recent digitisations in the cultural heritage sector and the growing impact of digital content and content distribution in the educational domain can offer promising opportunities for a new approach in cultural heritage education. In the EPICS project research groups, companies, cultural heritage institutions, public libraries and educational organisations join their forces to rethink cultural heritage education. The research activities in EPICS are divided in six interrelated work packages: user research, didactization, platform development, multichannel content creation and distribution, legal aspects, and a demonstrator.

Research activities concerning the EPICS-platform include:

the development of a generic community platform architecture that supports searching and retrieving content provided by various information stores and composing this content in mash-ups. These mash-ups will in turn become part of the content provided by the platform to allow for re-use.
the provision of a proof-of-concept implementation of the different components of this architecture, in order to allow demonstrating the benefits of such platform.
Design and implementation of the various tools needed for efficiently working with this platform: content meta-data creation / adaptation, mash-up creation and editing, mash-up viewing tools etc.