Introduction to the Special Issue on Digital Natural and Cultural Heritage: Opportunities and Challenges

This introduction to the special issue “Digital Natural and Cultural Heritage” has two aims: First, it briefly introduces individual contributions and explains how they relate to one another. Second, it explains our motivation for producing a special issue aimed at bridging the perceived gap between the fields of digital natural and cultural heritage. More concretely, it presents different computational approaches to tackle heterogeneity in digital natural and cultural heritage collections. Here the goal is to make information retrievable, interlinked, and interpretable for researchers and the general public. However, instead of offering final solutions, this special issue rather hopes to highlight the enormous potential that collaborations across domains have. We hope that we offer a starting point for transdisciplinary research in which researchers, curators, and infrastructure developers of both domains communicate and work much tighter together.