This half-day workshop addresses a critical but underexplored challenge in digital humanities infrastructure: governance. While many technical tutorials exist for tools such as Wikibase, OpenRefine, and RDF pipelines, far fewer address the structural barriers that prevent cultural heritage professionals from safely publishing and interoperating their collections at European scale. Legal uncertainty, layered rights regimes, fragmented ownership, and unclear institutional responsibility often block integration long before technical workflows begin—especially for complex artefacts such as music, audiovisual materials, 3D objects, and digital twins. A public-domain image may require only a CC0 declaration, but a musical recording typically involves multiple rights layers, and structured digital twins introduce further legal and semantic complexity.

The workshop presents a governance-first approach to designing Heritage Digital Twin infrastructures capable of connecting local collections to the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH), Europeana, the EU Open Data Portal, and Wikimedia platforms. Drawing on practical experience from a federated Data Sharing Space aligned with the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and developed within an ECCCH-oriented project working with vulnerable and Indigenous tangible and intangible heritage, participants will explore how legal, organisational, semantic, and technical layers must be designed together.

Through guided diagnostic exercises, participants will map governance risks within their own (or hypothetical) collections, including authors’ and neighbouring rights, moral rights, GDPR and personality rights, CARE principles, and challenges of private or mixed-ownership materials. A minimal modelling exercise will demonstrate how tangible and intangible heritage elements can be structured as a legally coherent digital twin without overexposing sensitive metadata.

Rather than focusing on a specific software workflow, the workshop equips participants with transferable governance frameworks necessary for sustainable, compliant participation in European cultural data spaces. (We will use a pre-installed OpenCollections Wikibase Suite for practicing to give reasonable publishing chance in half a day.)