The SILKNOW project, coordinated by the University of Valencia, has been awarded the Europa Nostra Award in the Research category. The initiative is one of the 30 selected in different fields from 18 European countries that the public can vote for from mid-August to mid-September to choose the winning action of the Public Choice Award, which will be announced at the ceremony on 26 September in Prague.

The action, set within the framework of the Horizon 2020 programme, produced digital tools beyond current technologies to improve our understanding and conservation of European silk heritage from 2018 to 2021. A team from the ARTEC group of the Institute on Robotics and Information and Communication Technologies (IRTIC), led by Marcos Fernández, along with the Department of History of Art of the Faculty of Geography and History, led by Ester Alba, applied research on next-generation information and communication technologies (ICT) to meet the needs of users in various fields, such as museums, education, tourism, and cultural and creative industries.

The award ceremony will take place on 26 September at the State Opera of Prague as part of the European Heritage Awards, which are held at the European Cultural Heritage Summit 2022 taking place from 25 to 27 September. Between mid-August and mid-September, people interested in heritage are encouraged to vote online to give one of the proposals the Public Choice Award, valued at €10,000 Award, which will be announced at the event.

The winning initiatives were selected by heritage experts from across Europe, following the evaluation by independent Selection Committees of applications submitted by organisations and individuals from 36 European countries.

The jury that has declared the winner in the research category of this project coordinated by the University of Valencia (UV), pointed out that "SILKNOW has created an innovative system to facilitate the transfer of knowledge about silk weaving".

“This project represents an important example of how crafts, and therefore intangible heritage, can be linked to digital tools and how these tools can be used to democratise access to technical knowledge”, has added the team from the organisation that awarded the prize to SILKNOW. It also has indicated that “the project’s machine-learning thesaurus is particularly interesting and has the potential to be applied in other areas of research”.

With the UV, the entities GARIN 1820 S.A. and Instituto Cervantes, also from Spain; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Lyon 2 and EURECOM, from France; Universita Degli Studi di Palermo, from Italy; Institut Jozef Stefan, from Slovenia; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universitaet Hannover, from Germany and Monkeyfab, from Poland, have participated in SILKNOW.

The European Heritage Awards, also known as Europa Nostra Awards, have highlighted and disseminated heritage excellence and best practices, encouraged the cross-border exchange of knowledge and connected heritage stakeholders in wider networks for 20 years.