The conference was organized by the Digital Heritage Lab of the Cyprus University of Technology and has the aim to bring together Cultural Heritage professionals and researchers. It has a strong focus on transdisciplinary approaches in Cultural Heritage, particularly focussing on the use of Information and Communication Technologies. This year 351 participants from 43 countries participated in the Conference and 158 papers were selected of 438 submissions.

The meSch project paper was not only accepted and presented at the conference, but also awarded 2nd best project paper presented. 

EUROMED 2014, Digital Heritage, @meschproject presentation time, by @DanielaPetrell1 pic.twitter.com/JHENfP0B4P

— Areti Damala (@Aretititi) November 4, 2014

For all those who would be interested in finding out more about the papers presented at the conference the proceedings containing the full and project papers are now online and will be free to download for ONLY a few days! The Short paper proceedings (POSTER papers), are also available for purchase online. The event images are available on the conference website.

Marinos Ioannides, at the closing ceremony of the EUROMED 2014 Digital Heritage Conference, Limassol, Cyprus pic.twitter.com/FCEMCtN3LQ

— Areti Damala (@Aretititi) 8 november 2014

On the program of the conference

This year’s conference ran from Monday 2nd November – Saturday 8^th November 2014. Among the keynote speakers was Gustavo Araoz, president of ICOMOS, Roberto Scopigno, Director of the ISTI Institute of the Italian National Research Council and Timothy Whalen, director of the Getty Conservation Institute.

The sessions, workshops, tutorials and panels that took place covered a large variety of issues related to the use of digital technologies for Cultural Heritage, for example:

• The role of documentation standards for protecting Cultural Property from looting and theft
• Digital Data Acquisition Technologies and Data Processing in Cultural Heritage
• Data management and visualization/presentation of Cultural Heritage Content
• Big Data in Cultural Heritage
• Standard, Metadata, Ontologies and Semantic Processing in Cultural Heritage Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies
• Innovative technologies to assess, monitor, restore and preserve Cultural heritage
• 2D and 3D GIS in Cultural Heritage
• Accessing the impact of EU Research, Development and Technology in the Digital Heritage Domain
• 3D and 4D documentation in Cultural Heritage, Policy and Safety

One of this year’s novelties was the hosting of a dedicated workshop on ICT Preservation and Transmission of Intangible Cultural Heritage, a relatively new topic in Digital Technologies on Cultural Heritage Preservation.

The EUROMED 2014 Digital Heritage conference participants also had the chance to participate in a workshop-tutorial on the Arches initiative of the Getty Conservation Institute and the Worlds Monuments Fund. Arches is a free open-source heritage inventory and management system.

Interested in a PhD or a career in Digital Cultural Heritage: Find out more about the ITN-DCH program

Finally, one of the most important initiatives, targeting the training of the next generation of Digital Cultural Heritage professionals was also presented in the conference. The “Initial Training Network for Digital Cultural Heritage: Projecting our Past to the Future” is the very first Marie-Curie fellowship program on Digital Cultural Heritage. The project/training program is comprised of 14 full partners and 8 associate members coming from Academia, industries, research institutes, museums and libraries and aims to train 20 fellows (16 pre-doctoral, 4 post-doctoral) in the area of Cultural Heritage documentation. Among the 20 fellowships, 3 fellowships for early stages researchers are still available, so if you think you might be interested check out this link!