European Heritage Days
How we built the AI-powered digital infrastructure for Europe’s most celebrated cultural programme
Powering a cultural celebration of 20 million visitors across Europe
The European Heritage Days (EHD) are the most widely celebrated cultural events in Europe. It draws an estimated 20 million visitors annually, showcasing the rich diversity of Europe’s shared heritage. Behind this massive participatory celebration is a powerful digital infrastructure designed to aggregate, manage, and present tens of thousands of events each year. WAAT plays a central role in building and maintaining this infrastructure—supporting everything from data ingestion and quality assurance to front-end presentation and discoverability.
The brief: Build a platform to manage and display over 30,000 cultural events each year
WAAT was tasked with creating a digital system capable of handling vast volumes of cultural event data from over 50 European countries. The challenge: ensure that the system could not only ingest and display more than 30,000 events each year but also deliver a coherent, multilingual, and user-friendly experience to audiences across Europe.
Digital solutions: Large-scale data scraping, AI quality control, and seamless publishing
-
Automated scraping from national sources
We built robust scraping tools that collect thousands of cultural events from national and regional websites across Europe.
-
AI-powered data quality assurance
With so many events submitted in multiple formats and languages, maintaining data quality is essential. WAAT developed AI-assisted tools that help standardise, clean, and enrich event data—ensuring consistency in formatting, language, categorisation, and geolocation. This enhances both the backend usability and the frontend discoverability.
-
Multilingual event portal
We designed and developed a public-facing website that presents all event listings in a multilingual format, enabling users to search and explore events by country, theme, date, and category. Each listing includes rich media, location details, and programme highlights.
-
Custom dashboards and analytics
We also developed internal dashboards to help the Council of Europe and national coordinators monitor submissions, track event trends, and analyse participation across countries. These insights are used to inform programme development and strengthen engagement.
Outcome
By scraping and managing over 30,000 events annually, and applying AI to maintain high data quality, WAAT enables a seamless experience for both organisers and the public. The result is a platform that helps bring Europe’s shared cultural heritage to life for millions each year.