The advent of Web 2.0 technologies changes the way the Web is used. The new Web forms a platform where users can connect, collaborate, and share information bringing together different media: text, video, images and 3D with different methodologies and applications. Omnipresent broadband access facilitates the use of multimedia, 3D and mixed reality, which offer an appealing medium for presentation of cultural heritage facilitating flexible, fun and engaging access. Also, P2P technologies provide unprecedented possibilities for sharing enormous amounts of heritage data in a distributed and highly scalable environment, forming ad-hoc groups of users, and enabling all communities to contribute.

DISPLAYS will exploit these technical and societal opportunities by combining P2P technologies with Semantic Web technologies and interactive 3D multimedia presentation of digital content. DISPLAYS clearly progresses beyond the current state-of-the-art in these domains, builds highly innovative web services that will empower the citizen and organization to create, semantically describe, maintain, publish, exchange and creatively exploit their digital heritage resources such as images, sounds, movies, 3D models, catalogues, and archives focused on Portable Antiquities. DISPLAYS technology will be presented to end users through personalised interfaces that will facilitate intuitive usage by individuals and organizations with different levels of computing expertise. DISPLAYS will stimulate development of a socio-economic culture of our digital heritage resources, facilitating a revolution in cultural heritage access, similar to the one in music and movie P2P networks, but based on a legal and self-sustaining cultural heritage business model accounting for ICT ethics and gender.

Participation of active heritage stakeholders from across Europe ensures a user-centric approach to development and provides good opportunities for wide dissemination and exploitation of results.