From an irreducible depth 2 inclusion of factors, verifying a regularity condition, the authors construct a multiplicative unitary, and an action, at every level of the canonical tower constructed from the inclusion; when this inclusion admits a faithful semifinite normal operator-valued weight, stronger conditions are given, and the tower appears then as a crossed-product construction. In particular they rederive Herman and Ocneanu’s results when the inclusion admits a faithful normal conditional expectation, and the tower is then the crossed-product construction, alternatively by a compact quantum group and by its dual, and, more precisely, according to Yamagami’s result, by a compact type Kac algebra and by its dual.