Hack the Pool 2026

Cross-institutional cultural data hackathon

When: Tuesday, 27. and Wednesday, 28. October 2026

Where: Austrian Academy of Sciences

Bäckerstraße 13, 1010 Vienna, Austria

Registration: You can now register either as a team or individually via this link .

Organisation: Natural History Museum Vienna (NHM), Kulturpool & Austrian Academy of Sciences (ACDH)

Two days, one mission: Bringing cultural data to life. At Hack The Pool 2026, data enthusiasts, developers, and cultural heritage researchers come together to explore the world of open cultural data and connect it to the world’s largest open knowledge graph.

Following the success of the 2025 pilot edition , Hack The Pool returns for its second edition. This year, the focus is on Linked Open Data and similarity search: How can cultural heritage data from Austrian memory institutions be linked, semantically enriched, and made discoverable as part of a global knowledge network?

The hackathon is organised in cooperation with the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) and is supported by CLARIAH-AT .

Registration

You can register as a team or individually. A project idea is welcome but not required – we will help participants form teams on site. No prior experience with the Kulturpool APIs is necessary.

Registration deadline: 6. October 2026, 23:59 MESZ.

Event Details

What is Hack The Pool?

Hack The Pool is an inter-institutional cultural data hackathon initiated by Kulturpool. It brings together creative minds from research, technology, and the cultural heritage sector to develop working prototypes based on open cultural data over the course of two intensive days.

In 2025, more than 35 participants formed five interdisciplinary teams and created five demonstrable open-source projects, ranging from augmented reality applications to AI-supported data linking. In 2026, we build on this success in cooperation with the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) in Vienna.

Who is the hackathon for?

Hack The Pool welcomes everyone interested in shaping the future of cultural data:

Developers with an interest in the Semantic Web and APIs
Data scientists with an affinity for graph structures and knowledge representation
Researchers and students in Digital Humanities, Computer Science, or related disciplines
Data stewards working at memory institutions
Cultural heritage enthusiasts with ideas they want to turn into reality

We warmly encourage both individuals and interdisciplinary teams to apply. No prior experience with the Kulturpool APIs is required – we will provide an introduction and support throughout the event.

The Data: Kulturpool APIs 2026

Participants will have access to an enhanced API infrastructure provided by Kulturpool:

Search API & Object API: Access to metadata and media files from Austrian cultural heritage institutions

Linked Open Data & Wikidata integration: Direct linking of Kulturpool data to Wikidata entities and the ability to query them – this is the key new feature of this year’s hackathon

Similarity Search: A new service for semantic similarity search across image and text data from Kulturpool collections

In addition, LLM token credits will be provided via OpenRouter and Replicate , enabling participants to integrate large language models into their projects.

Competition

At the end of the hackathon, each team will present its project in a slam format – short, focused, and impact-driven. All projects will be published under the MIT License in public GitHub repositories and documented on the Kulturpool website. The winning team will also be invited to present its project at the Provider Forum 2026 on 3 November 2026 in Vienna.

The projects from 2025 are available in the Starter Pack repository as inspiration and a starting point for new ideas.

Website Kulturpool