NTT DATA Creates and Makes Public a Digital Archive of the Historical Cultural Heritage of the ASEAN Region

NTT DATA Corporation has built a digital archive system for the ASEAN Cultural Heritage Digital Archive (ACHDA) project, being conducted by the ASEAN Secretariat to digitize the valuable historical cultural heritage of ASEAN countries. The first phase of this project has been completed, with a digital archive created of 160 cultural assets from Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia.

The cultural heritage archive will be made publicly available from February 27, 2020, for anyone in the world to view online at the ACHDA website. This system supports the images, audio recordings, and video data that are available on other NTT DATA digital archive systems, as well as an expanded capability to handle three-dimensional models of physical objects.

The second phase of the project, supposed to begin from fiscal 2020, will be to digitally archive cultural assets from Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Laos, and make them available on the archive site. Going forward, the project will be expanded to include all ten ASEAN member states in the future.

This project is being conducted with financial support from the Japan-ASEAN Integration Fund (JAIF), established in 2006 with the contribution from the Japanese government.

About the Digital Archive System

Previous digital archiving projects focused on capturing image, audio and video data of valuable objects such as documents. This project has allowed digitization of precious 3D objects, including shape, color, and texture data to be preserved and made available to the public. This has been achieved by expanding the capabilities of our digital archiving solution AMLAD® to prevent cultural heritage assets from being lost due to disasters, accidents, and aging, and to allow long-term preservation.

The ACHDA digital archive site will be launched online on February 27, 2020, allowing anyone from around the world to freely access the cultural heritage of ASEAN nations in digital data form.

Future work is being considered by the ASEAN Secretariat, and NTT DATA plans to further contribute to ASEAN by digitizing cultural heritage assets and building a sustainable digital archive system in all 10 ASEAN countries.

Katsuichi Sonoda, Senior Vice President, NTT DATA

I am truly honored that NTT DATA's information technologies can contribute to the preservation and sharing of ASEAN's precious cultural heritage through the ACHDA Project. It is my sincere hope that the value of this initiative will be widely known throughout ASEAN, and that by conveying the precious cultural assets of the present to future generations, new culture will be fostered.