Most cities in Europe are digitizing their cultural heritage but often lack the tools to leverage this rich data to engage their citizens. Because:

• Data is stuck within the institutional silos, giving a limited view on a certain topic
• The data is used on digital platforms that don’ reach out to new audiences
• Citizens are not engaged in re-using the data or to provide more context where available

With CoGhent we will focus on improving cultural participation and social cohesion in public and third places through the use of linked (open) data and visualizing it in an immersive digital experience room. We will make this work by:

• Linking and connecting the available cultural data and thus provide a full picture of our city’ heritage
• Creating tools and methods to speed up opening collection data
• Visualizing the data in a White Space, a hi-tech immersive digital experience room
• By providing the tools to citizens to crowdsource stories and knowledge on our shared cultural heritage
• By testing this White Space in 3 different neighborhoods in the city to measure its social impact

By linking heritage on a city level and using it to capture and show stories in cultural public spaces, we leverage digitized heritage to be used in an engaging and purposeful way as a shared connection amongst citizens. The resulting White Space will be given a permanent place in the future wing of the Design Museum Gent named DING, a permanent cultural third place.

Ghent University participates from two perspectives. Research group UGent-MICT is responsible for the work package user research, which entails the development of urban interaction design frameworks, defining design requirements, identifying behavioral patterns regarding cultural participation and social cohesion, co-designing the high-tech neighborhood experience, and finally, assessing the impact of the neighborhood intervention on social cohesion. Research group UGent-IDLab is responsible for the identification and formulation of value network configurations and business models as well as the technical design of the data queries, the development of a blueprint integration layer, ETL processes and open web API’s (WP5).