ECHOLOT is a Horizon Europe project (Grant Agreement: 101233096) under the HORIZON-CL2-2024-HERITAGE-ECCCH-01 call, part of the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) initiative. The project addresses the critical challenge that, while vast amounts of diverse CH data are available through Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs), active reuse is hindered by poor quality, lack of interoperability, and fragmented metadata. By integrating AI-enhanced workflows and human-in-the-loop curation, ECHOLOT enables: Quality curation and enrichment of CH data (including multimedia), embedding of rights metadata and provenance tracking to preserve data integrity, seamless interoperability between CH systems, aggregators (e.g., Europeana), and open knowledge platforms (e.g., Wikimedia ecosystem) and validation and testing through five diverse case studies across Europe. ECHOLOT serves as an interoperability hub, bridging gaps between CH data silos and fostering collaboration across institutional and sectoral boundaries.

ECHOLOT operates as an interoperability hub within a complex ecosystem of external actors and systems:

External actors:

• CH professionals, system administrators, software developers, citizens, and cultural/creative industries.

External systems:

• ECCCH/ECHOES: Cloud infrastructure, AAI/SSO, Knowledge Base (KB).
• MediaWiki Ecosystem: Open-source software suite, extensions, and contributors.
• Source Systems: Local repositories and databases of CH institutions.
• Target Systems: DS4CH/Europeana aggregators, Wikimedia ecosystem (Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons).
• Reference Resources: Controlled vocabularies, thesauri, gazetteers (e.g., GND, Geonames, VIAF).
• Hosting Infrastructure: During the project ECHOLOT system will be deployed on the server infrastructure of selected project partners. Once ready, it should also be deployable as a vertical application on the ECCCH cloud infrastructure.

ECHOLOT's core system is NeoWiki, an open-source MediaWiki extension for schema-based structured data and graph queries. Consortium partner Professional Wiki develops it at ProfessionalWiki/NeoWiki, with documentation and a demo wiki.