On 5 and 6 May 2026, the OpenLab hosted the second workshop of the European project YODA – Youth for Open Digital Acquisitions: About the Training in 3D Heritage and Best Practices. This two-day event followed a first workshop held in Switzerland in March, and precedes a final workshop in France as well as a concluding presentation at Maastricht University.
YODA investigates how 3D heritage is currently taught, practiced, and coordinated across CIVIS universities and partner institutions. Digital heritage is expanding rapidly, yet training practices, vocabularies, and data standards remain fragmented across Europe. Rather than creating new courses, YODA maps existing teaching activities related to 3D acquisition, documentation, processing, and data governance at ULB, UNIL, and AMU. The project compares academic programmes with the needs of institutional partners such as the Direction du Patrimoine numérique (Belgium) and CIPA Heritage Documentation (ICOMOS–ISPRS). Through collaborative workshops, cross-analysis, and a final international event, YODA will produce a synthetic report and an open-access toolkit to help universities and public institutions align training approaches, strengthen capacity, and build a shared European culture of digital heritage education.
The workshop provided an important opportunity for exchange between academic and institutional actors, highlighting a shared concern: the strong heterogeneity that still characterises the field of digital heritage, particularly in terms of methodologies, tools, standards, and vocabularies. Discussions confirmed the need to better connect academic training with the concrete needs of heritage institutions, while reinforcing collaboration at the European level. More broadly, this meeting contributed to identifying gaps and overlaps in current practices and to advancing a common objective: fostering greater coherence, sustainability, and interoperability in the training and use of 3D heritage data, through strengthened dialogue and shared frameworks.
