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Preface to "Cultural Heritage Storytelling, Engagement and Management in the Era of Big Data and the Semantic Web"Cultural heritage (CH) refers to a highly multidisciplinary research and application field that collects, archives, and disseminates traditions, monuments/artworks, and overall civilization legacies that have been preserved throughout the years of humankind. This effort is considered very important for historical and educational purposes, which can be deployed in schooling and training sessions, science and social/humanistic studies, artistic expression, and everyday entertaining environments. Todays'digital media landscape offers innumerable ways to expedite the above processes at both ends, i.e., CH content production and "consumption,"taking advantage of the contemporary networking utilities with the associated capabilities for augmented interaction. For instance, many museums and other art/cultural organizations have invested in the development of featured digital applications with appealing storytelling and their online dissemination to engage the audience in featured CH projects. Likewise, the proliferation of mobile devices and services and the vast expansion of the so-called User Generated Content (UGC) has fueled the digitization of personal CH artifacts and their progressive organizations in larger-scale databases. A typical example in that direction is the Europeana project, which formed specific media archiving and metadata standardization rules for CH institutions and sole users to follow. At the same time, urgent needs for better documentation and management of CH documents have emerged, making it difficult for the average user to be part of such large-scale undertakings.Today, Semantic Web and Big Data technologies promise the facilitation of more straightforward data analysis, information classification, semantic conceptualization, and management automation of multimodal content, which could also be applied for the benefit of the sensitive CH sectors.Specifically, these automation layers could work as mediated communication and collaboration mechanisms between corporations and individuals to accelerate the proper launching, maintenance, and sustainability of suitable CH repositories in favor of all the participants. For instance, many significant personal collections have not yet been detected, captured, fully restored, and documented (e.g., photos, films/movies, other private items, etc.). The development of sophisticated digital crowdsourcing procedures with the necessary technological/interdisciplinary cooperation and support would allow mining and shaping such unique CH masterpieces, in addition to making them available to the public. Thereafter, suitable engaging audience practices and models are welcomed to enhance the impacts of heritage i...