On 6 and 7 May 2025, our SRN had its second annual face to face meeting and workshop. Hosted at the University of Helsinki, participants from Swansea, Leuven, Copenhagen, Ghent, Antwerp, Helsinki/Aalto and additionally the Netherlands (from the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands) met for two intensive days of work.

Our main goal and theme for this meeting was to envisage what a HPC-Sampo would look like, inspired by the Sampo series of semantic portals by the Semantic Computing Group at Aalto University. Having identified some possible datasets with which to begin work, a key challenge was to work out what fields would be needed in order to make sense of the information available about HPCs. As SRN member Jiyun Zhang commented via Linkedin:

How are the Semantic Web and machine learning transforming heritage theory, practice, and policy? What does it take to build more inclusive classification systems that reflect diverse cultural values? How can citizen science and participatory heritage management empower communities? And how are digital technologies reshaping the definitions and collaborative models of “heritage communities”?​

Thinking about the 'digitized world' aspect of our SRN helped immensely in helping us also to focus once again on the fundamental question of what a HPC actually is, and what being (in) a HPC actually means. 

Huge thanks to our colleagues at the University of Helsinki and Aalto University for the warm hospitality. We will all meet together next in 2026 in Swansea!