Digital heritage and semantic web technologies hold out the promise of almost unlimited access to cultural knowledge. The difficulty is that cultural meaning does not reside in individual objects but in the patterns of knowledge and events, belief and thought that link them to each other and to the observer. This is why story is so important to the communication of, and meaningful understanding of culture.

It is hoped that the Decipher project will result in a reasoning engine, virtual environment and interfaces that can help curators and visitors to present digital heritage objects as part of a coherent narrative that is directly related to a user's interests. This will allow the user to interactively assemble, visualise and explore, not just collections of objects, but the knowledge structures that connect and give them meaning.