The Full Form of BRICKS is Building Resources for Integrated Cultural Knowledge Services.

BRICKS aims at establishing the organisational and technological foundations of a Digital Library based on European Digital Memory. A “digital library” in this context refers to a networked system of services over globally available collections of multimedia digital documents. The BRICKS results will constitute the main assets of a Factory, which has been subsidised by the Consortium partners and the ED for the duration of the Project, but will sustain itself in the future.

The mission of the BRICKS Factory is the definition, development and maintenance of a user- and service-oriented space to share knowledge and resources in the Cultural Heritage domain. In order to achieve this ambitious goal, BRICKS must advance the Status of the Art in the Digital Libraries in the following aspects:
a) employ a service-oriented approach, focusing on the right added value for the user, in contrast to the traditional content-oriented approach;
b) rely on a distributed open infrastructure, in order to reduce the cost of development and deployment of new services by maximising the re-use of existing results and to reduce maintenance costs by eliminating the need for a centralized organisational and/or technical infrastructure:
c) see emergent semantics as an evolutionary process, derived from local interactions and agreements in order to overcome linguistic and ontological barriers and realise a shared knowledge space.

The critical mass needed to sustain and develop this scientific and technical impact requires the use of the innovative instrument designed by the EC in the 6th Framework: the Integrated Project. BRICKS is integrated in the following ways: – it aims at integrating the wide spectrum of experience and background present in its Consortium: research, business, technology, art and culture; – its integration of concrete objectives (four main user application scenarios) and an ambitious vision for the future of Digital Cultural Heritage.