CIPHER is a two and a half year project supported by the European Commission under the theme 'Heritage for All' that started in April 2002. The overall objective of the CIPHER project is to develop the methodology and technology required to realise sustainable Cultural Heritage Forums that empower communities of interest to explore, research and build content. A Cultural Heritage (CH) Forum is defined as an online space where people can participate and learn through accessing and contributing to a range of heritage resources organised around a common theme. Users of the Cultural Heritage Forum are therefore engaged as active participants rather than passive viewers. Cultural Heritage Forums have an associated region which may traverse country borders.

The four Cultural Heritage Forums are:

• Irish Cultural and Natural Heritage. This CH Forum will primarily use information from a large database of Irish archaeology held digitally by the Discovery Programme.
• Nordic Heritage through Storytelling and Historical Artefacts. A CH Forum built around the narratives represented in the Carta Marina, 1539.
• Shared Heritage of Central Europe. This CH Forum will provide online access to a large volume of data concerning historical sites in the Czech Republic and Austria.
• Tradition of Technology Innovation in South Central England. This CH Forum will build on the historical record of the cryptanalysis work done at Bletchley Park, home of Collossus, the World's first programmable computer.

The first set of trails were conducted during the first half of 2003. These focused on identifying user groups within each forum, training, and deploying the first set of CIPHER tools within these communities. The tools deployed provided support for presentation and visualisation, resource clustering, static predefined narratives and collaboration. The trials conducted in each Cultural Heritage Forum involved one or more communities. In total, nine communities participated in the first CIPHER trial.

To find out more about how the nine communities participated in the first trials click on the following links:

• Bletchley Park Guides
• SCOOTER
• Historical Monument Protection
• Art History Students
• Historical Guild of Schwarzenberg
• Cross-Border Municipalities
• Exploring Carta Marina
• The Discovery Programme
• Archaeology Students

During the first set of trials a number of CIPHER tools were deployed. These included:

• Community Story Exchange (CSE) - a generic toolkit providing support for online storytelling in communities.
• Apollo - a graphical ontology editor that allows people to define concepts and relations between them.
• The Resource Annotation and Outline creation (RAT-O) tool – for the description and location of web resources, and the construction of narrative outlines.
• An online journal environment for repurposing documents for web publication.
• RiSKommunal - multi-lingual regional historic information system.
• Soft Ontology Layer (SOL) tool – for the lightweight description of historical artefacts.
• Automatic Description Engine (ADE) – an automated tool for the visualization of large textual corpora.
• explorer.ie – for the publishing and indexing of archaeological lessons.

The nine communities that participated in the first set of CIPHER project trials were able to use the CIPHER tools and methods to:

• Establish an online presence for a community.
• Build a community memory of heritage stories.
• Create and publish their own research.
• Provide multi-lingual access to communal resources.
• Visualise and cluster large sets of heritage data.
• Develop formal classification schemes for their heritage domain.
• Classify and organise heritage resources around a common theme.

The next trials are due to begin in late 2003.