mosaic

1. a design or decoration made up of small pieces of coloured glass, stone, etc.

2. the process of making a mosaic

3. Genetics another name for chimera

4. a light-sensitive surface on a television camera tube, consisting of a large number of granules of photoemissive material deposited on an insulating medium

Mosaic

, Mosaical

of or relating to Moses or the laws and traditions ascribed to him

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

Mosaic

A process of inlaying small pieces of stone, tile, glass or enamel into a cement or plaster matrix, making a pattern, design, or representational picture.

mosaic

[mō′zā·ik]

(biology)

An organism or part made up of tissues or cells exhibiting mosaicism.

(electronics)

A light-sensitive surface used in television camera tubes, consisting of a thin mica sheet coated on one side with a large number of tiny photosensitive silver-cesium globules, insulated from each other.

(embryology)

An egg in which the cytoplasm of early cleavage cells is of the type which determines its later fate.

(petrology)

Pertaining to a granoblastic texture in a rock formed by dynamic metamorphism in which the boundaries between individual grains are straight or slightly curved. Also known as cyclopean.

Pertaining to a texture in a crystalline sedimentary rock in which contacts at grain boundaries are more or less regular.

(science and technology)

A surface pattern made by the assembly and arrangement of many small pieces.

mosaic

mosaic, 1

1. A pattern formed by inlaying small pieces of stone, tile, glass, or enamel into a cement, mortar, or plaster matrix.

2. A form of surface decoration, similar to marquetry, but usually employing small pieces or bits of wood to create an inlaid design.

mosaic

In photogrammetry, an assembly of overlapping aerial photographs that have been matched to form a continuous photographic representation of a portion of the earth's surface. A mosaic may be controlled, semicontrolled, or uncontrolled. A controlled mosaic is one that is laid to ground control and in which prints are used that have been ratioed and rectified as shown necessary by the control. A semicontrolled mosaic is composed of corrected or uncorrected prints laid to a common basis of orientation other than ground control. An uncontrolled mosaic is composed of uncorrected prints, the details of which have been matched from print to print without ground control or another orientation. Also called an aerial mosaic.

Mosaic

(World-Wide Web, tool)

NCSA's browser (client) for the World-Wide Web.

Mosaic has been described as "the killer application of the 1990s" because it was the first program to provide a slick multimedia graphical user interface to the Internet's burgeoning wealth of distributed information services (formerly mostly limited to FTP and Gopher) at a time when access to the Internet was expanding rapidly outside its previous domain of academia and large industrial research institutions.

NCSA Mosaic was originally designed and programmed for the X Window System by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at NCSA. Version 1.0 was released in April 1993, followed by two maintenance releases during summer 1993. Version 2.0 was released in December 1993, along with version 1.0 releases for both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. An Acorn Archimedes port is underway (May 1994).

Marc Andreessen, who created the NCSA Mosaic research prototype as an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois left to start Mosaic Communications Corporation along with five other former students and staff of the university who were instrumental in NCSA Mosaic's design and development.

http://ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/help-about.html.

ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.

E-mail: <mosaic-x@ncsa.uiuc.edu> (X version), <mosaic-mac@ncsa.uiuc.edu> (Macintosh), <mosaic-win@ncsa.uiuc.edu> (Windows version), <mosaic@ncsa.uiuc.edu> (general help).

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)

Mosaic

The first multimedia browser for the Web, allowing text, images, sound and video to be accessed via a graphical user interface. Mosaic was created by Marc Andreessen, Eric Bina and others at the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

The "Killer App" of the Web
Mosaic was released on the Internet in 1993 and became "the" application that caused the Web to explode. Originally developed for Unix, it was ported to Windows and Mac within a few months. Both Andreessen and Bina later went to work for Mosaic Corporation, which was formed to market Mosaic, but wound up developing the Netscape browser. The company was renamed Netscape, and the Netscape browser reigned supreme for a while.

The University eventually licensed Mosaic to Spyglass, Inc., which Microsoft acquired. Thus, the Mosaic browser ultimately evolved into Internet Explorer. See Web browser and Netscape.

Mosaic Browser

Looking a bit outdated compared to today's browsers, Mosaic was nevertheless a major catalyst in revolutionizing the world. It helped the Web to explode, and ultimately, the Internet to go commercial. (Image courtesy of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.)

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Mosaic

a representational or nonrepresentational design executed with tesserae of pebbles, smalto, or ceramic tiles. One of the principal genres of monumental decorative art, mosaic is also used to embellish works of the decorative and applied arts. Less frequently, mosaics are in the form of portable pictures. A special type of mosaic work is inlay.

Mosaic work involves affixing pieces of material with simple geometrical or intricate shapes (cut from a pattern) to a surface of lime, cement, mastic, or wax. There are two methods of making mosaics. The direct method involves pressing the tesserae into an adhesive that covers the surface to be decorated. The “reverse” method involves gluing the tesserae face down on a picture drawn on cardboard or cloth and then covering their backs with an adhesive; the temporary base is subsequently removed and the resultant block is mounted on a wall or ceiling.

The most ancient mosaics that have been preserved are ornaments made from small, variously colored clay circles (found in Mesopotamian temples from the third millennium B.C.). Ancient Greek and Roman mosaic work, which was used primarily as floor coverings, evolved from simple nonrepresentational and representational decoration executed in pebbles to elaborate multicolored or black-and-white compositions made with cut stones, inlaid by the direct method, and polished after inlaying (resulting in their characteristic even surface sheen).

Byzantine mosaics, made from smalto and (often semiprecious) stones, were left unpolished in order to achieve a special depth and resonance of color. Mosaics such as those in the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Constantinople, with their glittering surface and abundant use of gold, blended organically with the massive walls and enriched the interior space. Mosaic decoration also flourished in countries where Byzantine traditions were interpreted, for example, in Italy, Georgia (mosaics in the 12th-century Helati Monastery), and ancient Rus’ (llth- and 12th-century mosaics in the Cathedral of St. Sophia and the St. Michael Zlatoverkhii Monastery in Kiev).

Western European Romanesque mosaics for the most part are purely ornamental. Beginning with the 13th century, tendencies toward a more realistic depiction of the world gradually led to the replacement of mosaics by paintings. In Italy in the 16th century there developed what are known as Florentine mosaics. Made from polished colored stones, they were used to adorn interiors and furniture. Mosaics executed entirely in smalto, which first become popular in the 17th century, imitate the effects of oil painting.

In Islamic countries, as well as in medieval Spain and Portugal, colorful glazed-tile mosaics developed in the 13th and 14th centuries. In these mosaics the pieces, which are cut according to patterns, form intricate arabesques that are subordinated to the architecture. The best examples of 14th- and 15th-century Middle Asian mosaics include the facings of building portals in Samarkand and Bukhara and the domes of the Tiurabekkhanym mausoleum near Kunia-Urgench.

In Russia the technique of smalto mosaic was revived in the 18th century by M. V. Lomonosov, under whose supervision portable portraits and battle scenes were executed in mosaic. In 1864 a department for the preparation of mosaics for St. Isaac’s Cathedral was organized by the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts.

Artists and craftsmen working in the art nouveau and national-romantic styles (for example, the Spaniard A. Gaudí, the Austrian G. Klimt, and the Russian artists V. M. Vasnetsov and M. A. Vrubel’) frequently used tile mosaics.

In contemporary mosaics, whose component pieces are usually large, compositions based on combinations of bold patches of local color predominate (works by R. Guttuso, F. Leger, D. Rivera, D. Siqueiros, and H. Erni). The art of mosaic has particularly flourished since the 1930’s as the result of growing interest in problems dealing with the synthesis of the arts. Among works by artists of the older generation, the best known were the smalto mosaics of A. A. Deineka and P. D. Korin, as well as the “Florentine” mosaics of G. I. Opryshko. Since the 1960’s, A. V. Vasnetsov, V. V. Mel’nichenko, D. M. Merpert, B. P. Miliukov, A. F. Rybachuk, B. A. Tal’berg, B. P. Chernyshev, and V. B. El’konin have produced striking examples of furniture decorated with mosaic.

REFERENCES

Karger, M. K. “K voprosu ob ubranstve inter’era v russkom zodchestve domongol’skogo perioda.” In Trudy Vserossiiskoi Akademii khudozhestv, Leningrad-Moscow, 1947.
Lazarev, V. N. Istoriia vizantiiskoizhivopisi, vols. 1–2, Moscow, 1947–48.
Tomaev, T. N. Reznaia maiolikovaia mozaika v arkhitekture Srednei Azii 14–15 vv. Moscow, 1951.
Vinner, A. V. Materialy i tekhnika mozaichnoi zhivopisi. Moscow, 1953.
Tolstoi, V. P. Sovetskaia monumental’naia zhivopis’. Moscow, 1958.
Chubova, A. P., and A. P. Ivanova. Antichnaia zhivopis’. Moscow, 1966.
Demus, O. Byzantine Mosaic Decoration. London, 1948.
Mosaique gréco-romaine. Paris, 1963.
Rossi, F. Mosaics. New York, 1970.
Lebedeva, V. Sovetskoe monumental’noe iskusstvo shestidesiatykh godov. Moscow, 1973.

V. V. FILATOV