Too often one focuses on standards and the technological potential of infrastructures, rarely operating to understand what is desired and what is expected from these tools, starting from their titles and their services regarding cultural heritage. This is why MOSAIC does not wish to limit itself by imposing standards, but rather it poses the problem of how one must value (with the use of technological standards) his/her daily working experience when confronted with managing and promoting his/her cultural heritage on a daily basis. The general theme, therefore, becomes: the quality of the contents and the way to utilize it through the help of new multimedial and virtual reality technology but not viceversa.
Moreover, MOSAIC proposes creating the right synergy between workers and the vastest possible audience of users. The initiatives that are taken within the context of cultural heritage are thus often insufficiently disseminated or insufficiently made fruitful for the vast public. On one hand, the strong desire to retrieve information is perceived, however, on the other, the tiles ("tesserae") or the network for making them available are not found. The first process is therefore of a logical nature: to create a whole of tiles that are in themselves self-consistent and position them within the global context away from the States, and finally producing a multiple mosaic with many potential point of views. Even the smallest initiatives or those considered to be of minor value can reveal themselves to be important and successful if placed in the appropriate context. This is the simple contribution that MOSAIC wishes to bring forth: compose pre-existing initiatives without altering the rules of promotion, but valorizing and amplifying them through its distributed network.
All of these considerations and the complexity of the applied theme combined with the need for multilinguistic and interoperable services represent the basic elements of the MOSAIC project. The route chosen starts from a network of relationships between pre-existing partners within the European, Mediterranean and G7 environments which constitutes the first step of the Mosaic Project: the Human-Network.
MOSAIC - thanks to its many partners - believes it can create that synthesis on applicative themes and services that can constitute the starting point of a path on which the first steps are being taken.
Within the first year of work, the project will make available to all the partners or those joining a solution at hand on how to predispose services with additional value in a capillary way; a set of tools specialized for the cultural field; an international network capable of disseminating the available products and rendering an ensemble of commercial agreements economically advantageous for whoever presently has at hand any qualified cultural heritage information.
MOSAIC'S success is measured by the capacity of catalyzing new partners and by offering distributed services to a vast amount of users. The road taken is not an easyone , however, the objective is very clear: to converge the cultural heritage on the global highway of information, rather, to allow it to drive on the right-hand lane which is easily retrievable from the largest number of users possible.