Datenraum Kultur – the national Data Space Culture project

The Datenraum Kultur project is working on new ways to create value in the cultural sector, the media and creative industries through digital services that also protect third party intellectual property rights. The project places particular emphasis on the sovereignty of data owners, authors and service providers. In the system architecture, this is implemented by transferring the contents directly between the parties involved instead of making it available through a central hub. The Datenraum Kultur project will create an easily accessible and highly user-friendly system. This infrastructure will allow a large number of different players to negotiate sharing agreements and to exchange their contents directly in a trustworthy network. As a part of the Digitalstrategie Deutschland, the German Goverment´s national data strategy, the project helps organizations in the cultural sector to develop new data-driven business models, thereby strengthening their economic independence and digital self-determination.Until the end of 2025, an interdisciplinary team of experts from Fraunhofer FIT will work with partners from several application domains to develop this new infrastructure for the cultural sector. The goal is to open up new opportunities for the creators and owners to share their data / content in more diverse ways and to use their resources more efficiently to establish innovative digital value-added services for their theaters, museums and all sorts of cultural institutions and venues. The use cases explored in the project illustrate the enormous potential of data space technologies and thus promote the discussion and development of viable strategies for digital transformation within the cultural communities.

Four key use cases illustrate the scope of the Datenraum Kultur project.

Cultural platforms: Bundling and personalizing cultural offerings across regions

In many German regions, web platforms serve as central contact points that provide the general public with specific information on cultural events and venues in a region, tourist attractions, hotels etc., but rarely with further content on related topics. A decentralized data space will make it possible to link additional cultural content along several platforms. In this way, supplementary information, for example from other open digital sources such as the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, can be combined with content that is only available to registered or subscribed users. Users can benefit from links to other services and, for example, during a journey retrieve cultural information on a regional event from other external sources by  based on personal preferences. This use case is being implemented by SICP at University of Paderborn and OstWestfalenLippe GmbH, working with the regional cultural platforms OWL live in the East Westphalia-Lippe region and kulturis, which covers a region in southern Lower Saxony.

Museums: Enabling transfer and reuse of multimedia content

Currently, managing the rights to use digitized material in a museum requires considerable resources, which limits its reuse outside of specific museum offerings. In cooperation with other national players  (NFDI4Culture, ddb, DNB) , the Datenraum Kultur project aims to make digitized material available in accordance with European data standards, making it more accessible and reusable. In the long term, we aim to let museums use digital content – image, sound and text information as well as virtual reality – to integrate external exhibition objects into their own presentations. Hamburger Kunsthalle is the leading partner museum in this use case, working together with Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin.

Theaters: Machine-readable playing schedules for automated data transfer

A third use case is the development of common standards for processing theater schedules. The prevailing conditions in German theaters make it difficult for them to process and provide structured schedule data. In addition, the limited transfer of schedule data to other portals hinders theater-related research projects. The Datenraum Kultur project aims to automate the transfer of machine-readable playing schedules. This will enable cultural institutions to increase their reach and shorten time-consuming coordination processes in the event of last-minute changes. This use case is closely related to the digitization of cultural platforms described above. Deutscher Bühnenverein makes its network available to negotiate a set of rules for standardized schedule data within the theater community. Staatstheater Augsburg and Akademie für Theater und Digitalität Dortmund joined the project as technology integration partners.

Music marketplace: Making music together in the digital space

A fourth use case aims to create a marketplace for music education. The coronavirus pandemic has clearly shown that there is currently a lack of digital spaces and support for making music together but in different locations. Here the Datenraum Kultur project works with Hamburger Konservatorium, a gatekeeper to a broad network of music schools and other stakeholders, including those from the church music sector. Hamburger Konservatorium is expanding their teaching activities into the digital world with an innovative service-platform musiq.me and is aiming to become a leading service provider for connecting music teachers and students. To this end, they are developing a digital marketplace that will bring together profile information of teachers and students from various sources and will allow them to book virtual rehearsal rooms and practice sessions with music teachers and musicians at the right level of expertise.

Networking data with services

Fraunhofer FIT contributes to the technical implementation of the Datenraum Kultur project by analyzing the requirements and benefits of the highly idiosyncratic application domains. In line with the general data space concept, here too, data sharing must be fair, transparent and secure. To this end, the institute draws on its expertise in the specification, implementation and application of data space technologies from the International Data Spaces Association, the European Gaia-X initiatives and previous data space projects in other domains and applies it tailored to the specific groups of users in this field.

The project makes use of several core competencies of Fraunhofer FIT. The Human-Centered Engineering & Design department identifies the requirements of the different user groups applying our human-centered design methodology. The Data Science and Artificial Intelligence department is responsible for the technical implementation of the data space components. The Cooperation Systems department manages the execution and implementation of the requirements analyses and supports the cross-domain political cooperation. Together with acatech – National Academy of Science and Engineering, Fraunhofer FIT is coordinating the overall project in close cooperation with the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg.

The Datenraum Kultur research project is on the right track in simplifying the use of data in line with the European understanding of copyright and personal rights.

In the longer term, establishing the cultural data space might give rise to a new field of excellence. Cultural institutions in Europe should not only create digital content, but also make sure that it is used here for the benefit of the general public.

There is enormous potential in sharing digital content, especially when scientific research, cultural institutions and creative agencies work closely together. This is true not only for museum use in the context of major exhibitions, but also on an individual level, where low-threshold access to data use can generate completely new formats for engaging with art and its curation.”