Hafenstrom will coordinate HERITWIN, a European cultural heritage project that will test whether digital twin methods, semantic data and participatory workflows can help heritage institutions manage real sites, collections and risks.
Hafenstrom has been selected to coordinate HERITWIN, a European project on cultural heritage and digital innovation (HORIZON-CL2-2025-01). It is scheduled to start in September 2026, run for 30 months and open with a consortium kick-off meeting in Brussels on 7–8 September 2026.
The project’s practical question is narrower than the phrase “digital innovation” can suggest. HERITWIN is not being presented as a general technology showcase. It will test how heritage institutions can organise existing documentation, create or validate cultural digital twins, connect data through semantic methods and involve users who are responsible for the heritage environment after a pilot ends.
The work will be tested through five pilot settings in Sweden, Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom and Greece. These pilots cover different heritage contexts, from archival reconstruction and archaeological documentation to micro-climate monitoring and preparedness. Their value will depend on whether the consortium can compare evidence across sites rather than produce five separate demonstrations.
Hafenstrom, as a coordinator, must keep the pilots aligned, support reporting and quality assurance, help partners use comparable evidence records, and make sure local results can be read as part of a European validation effort. That includes tracking what data was used, which assumptions were made, which users tested the workflow and which limits became visible during implementation.
The Norwegian connection gives the project a clear local anchor. The Telemark Canal pilot will examine how digital twin methods can support preparedness and predictive conservation in a living heritage environment. The canal is both infrastructure and cultural landscape: it connects Skien and Dalen, includes historic lock systems, and remains part of tourism, maintenance, public access and regional identity.
HERITWIN’s first months should therefore be used to settle practical foundations: pilot plans, technical baselines, data responsibilities, rights and access conditions, stakeholder involvement and reporting routines. The expected outputs should be treated as targets to be tested, not as achievements already delivered. By the end of the project, the consortium should be able to show what worked, what failed, what evidence was collected and what other heritage organisations can realistically reuse.
The HERITWIN project is funded by European Commission through Horizon Europe Cluster 2 2025 Heritage-03