MOSAICA

Mosaica

The MOSAICA project took place in the years 2006-2008 funded by the 6th RTD Framework Program of the European Union.

MAKASH was asked by the Jewish Agency of Israel to substitute it as a partner in this project. MAKASH coordinated the activities of WP1 that identified and selected Jewish content and was responsible for its accessibility. MAKASH played a leading role in WP4 that focused on the development of the pedagogical approach of the project.

MOSAICA developed a toolbox of generic technologies for intelligent presentation, knowledge based discovery, and interactive and creative educational experience. It catered for a broad variety of diversified cultural heritages, and selected the Jewish heritage as a use case for the demonstration of results.

To this purpose, MOSAICA introduced two cutting edge technologies:

(1) Semantic Web and ontology engineering enabling the conceptualisation and the semantics driven integration of the complexity of the cultural objects, and

(2) Distributed content management enabling seamless aggregation of highly distributed and diversified content.

MOSAICA developed:

  1. A unifying framework for the ontology based conceptualisation of cultural objects and resources, combining domain expertise and ontology engineering,
  2. Tools and utilities for online communities to become actively engaged in the publishing process, contribute their knowledge, and partake in a dynamic creation and conceptualisation of the cultural resources,
  3. Knowledge driven, interactive, and user friendly interfaces to the distributed digital content that allow exploration and discovery of cultural resources through a multifaceted portal designed to deliver unique and creative user experience, and
  4. Methodology and technological utilities for the design of the so-called Virtual Expeditions, defined as thematically organised succession of virtualised cultural objects exposed as Web resources, bound together by a conceptual model, and allowing interactive exploration through alternative trails, or through examination of the thematically pre-selected semantically related content.