Datenraum Kultur

Fraunhofer FIT Supports Nationwide Data Exchange in the Cultural Sector

The Datenraum Kultur (Cultural Data Space) project aims to open new avenues for value creation through digital services for the entire culture, media, and creative industries sector while protecting the rights of third parties. It places special emphasis on the sovereignty of data owners, creators, and service providers by ensuring that data is not centrally stored but transferred directly between participants.

The Cultural Data Space is designed to be easily accessible and user-friendly, enabling direct and trustworthy networking of offerings from a variety of different actors through the provided infrastructure and supporting the negotiation of agreements between participating partners.

As an integral part of Germany's Digital Strategy, the project promotes the digital self-determination of cultural professionals by helping them develop new data-driven business models for the cultural sector.

Technology Foundation

The project is built on IDS/Gaia-X data space technologies, leveraging the Eclipse Dataspace Connector (EDC) as the core component for secure and sovereign data exchange. This documentation covers the EDC Management API, which provides the interface for:

• Managing Assets (digital resources with metadata)
• Creating and managing Contract Definitions and Agreements
• Conducting Contract Negotiations between data providers and consumers
• Executing Data Transfers with full control over access and usage policies

Key Use Cases

Cultural Platforms: Bundling Regional Cultural Offerings

Regional cultural platforms provide specific event information to interested parties, but rarely offer additional content on related topics. A decentralized data space enables culture-specific offerings to be linked across multiple platforms. Complementary information from other open digital sources, such as the German Digital Library (DDB), can be combined with data that may only be used based on a previously concluded usage agreement.

Museums: Enabling Multimedia Data Transfer and Reuse

Currently, managing usage rights for digitized works in museums requires considerable resources, limiting their reuse outside specific museum offerings. The project aims to make digitized works available according to European data standards, making them more accessible and reusable. This opens up the possibility of making exhibition objects with images, sound, text information, and virtual reality permanently available in new digital contexts.

Theaters and Stages: Machine-Readable Theater Schedules

The prevailing conditions and short-term individual situations in theater make structured digital processing of schedule data difficult. Limited connections to other portals also hinder cultural studies theater research. The Cultural Data Space aims for automated data transfer of machine-readable theater schedules. Through this initiative, cultural institutions can increase their reach and shorten time-consuming coordination processes for short-term changes.

Music Marketplace: Making Music Together in Digital Spaces

The Corona pandemic clearly showed that there are insufficient digital spaces and support for making music together while being spatially distributed. The Hamburg Conservatory is expanding its teaching operations into the digital world, aiming to become a leading service provider for connecting music teachers with potential music students through the Musiq.me marketplace platform.

Project Partners

The project brings together various core competencies:

• Fraunhofer FIT - Technical implementation and data space technologies
• acatech - German Academy of Science and Engineering
• SICP | Paderborn University - Regional cultural platforms
• Hamburg Authority for Culture and Media - Project coordination
• Hamburger Kunsthalle - Museum use case
• Deutscher Bühnenverein - Theater association
• Hamburg Conservatory - Music marketplace

Funded by: The German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media

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