Communities have a considerable contribution to production, evaluation and sharing of growing scientific, social and cultural digital content with a great deal of enthusiasm and inspiration. Europe, with its unique cultural heritage and creative potential, is well placed to take advantage of creating such digital communities, so Europeans should be provided with adequate support and digital content platforms in order to exploit this potential.This project aims to provide a platform for individuals and organizations to form self-organizing communities and enable these communities to acquire, contribute, and exploit sharing of personal cultural heritage, thereby to create a cultural economy.

Individuals such as collectors, hobbyists, non-interested holders etc. and small-scale cultural organizations have great amount of scientific, social and cultural treasure waiting to be lightened and shared with community.

The success of WEB 2.0 is unmistakable both in social-networking and in digital community creation by attracting people’s interest to collaborate, trade and share. “The Web is no more linking the information, the WEB is linking people, WEB 2.0 is linking people...”, is a general but really good description of WEB 2.0. We would like to take advantage of this new vision of web in digital culture.

Communities, “The Wisdom of Crowds”, and WEB 2.0, therefore, are key concepts that we really trust in for digitization, preservation and sharing of personal cultural heritage. Hence, the aim of this project is to create an attractive and scalable platform and tools in order to gather cultural heritages holded by individuals in terms of digitization and to create self-organized communities performing collaboration, sharing and business of non-famous personal heritages, thus creating a large scale digital library comprised of personal digital libraries and museums. Besides, this platform will contribute extraction and spread of cultural knowledge by promoting interests of contributors.

The project aims to realize;

• Development of scalable, attractive and robust WEB2.0 platform and tool(s) for migration of European wide cultural content holded by individuals and NGOs to digital form and enabling mass collection, access, preservation and tracking overtime. Furthermore, creating the oportunity of cultural knowledge sharing and extraction over digitalised content by cultural collaboration.

• Peer-to-peer sharing tool(s) to enable creation and handling of multi-source distributed content and to increase accessibility and availability of the content.

• Equipping the platform and social tools with semantic based search capabilities in order to provide efficient and successful content access which will also enable creation of social networks around semantic content, thereby allowing self-organized communities to be formed.

• Adoption of IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) Management Model(s) and end-to-end security model(s), therefore motivating individuals and GNOs to share their cultural holdings with community by satisfying privacy and property rights concerns, thereby providing a trustworthy platform and social tools.

• Adoption of Business Model(s) in support of cultural trade, thus enabling contribution of SMEs and traders to the platform in order to create a cultural economy which will act as catalyst in social networking.

• Enabling and facilitating involvement of Community of Practices and organizations for expert evaluation, interpretation and discovery of cultural assets in order to avoid heavy burden of junk content and to create valuable and meaningful cultural content.