Indeed, prior to this project, a vast majority of cultural-heritage related contents were limited to monolingual or mono-national dimensions. The partners carrying out the project believed this domain to be a subject of crucial impact that was still ineffectively and inadequately addressed in Europe, if at all, and launched this initiative to fill this void.

As such, eRMIONE is meant to encourage European-wide actors to take part either as content providers or as pilot users, resulting in a twofold benefit for the EU: preservation of all existing cultures, and reinforcement and widespread of tolerance and mutual respect, thus providing enrichment and EU-awareness for the citizenry.

eRMIONE delivers on-line services for specific educational programs involving researchers, teachers and students all over Europe. These services allow design, retrieval, interchange, and mastery of a wide range of e-courses and cultural contents and experiences; building of cross cultural training and research sessions; and holding virtual classrooms grouping Europe-wide students within the cultural realm.

Major milestones of the effective development of the eRMIONE project are the set up and launching of pilot sites, their validation and refinement through evaluation, and a full commercialisation and deployment that addresses, at the first stage, the target market of higher education institutions across Europe. At the time the workshop is being held, mid-July 2006, the eRMIONE project is due to be at its half-time, i.e. internal validation and assessment are to be complete, and the external validation should be ready to be launched.

The aim of the international workshop is twofold:

• Bringing together various actors from outside the eRMIONE initiative, both from private corporations and public administrative bodies with similar interests in culture. They should also preferably have experience or be intending to use similar software services within the cultural heritage domain. This will make it possible for the event to host a productive discussion and be an interchange for points of view, as well providing a forum to examine the main utilities required; and,
• Profiting from this opportunity to discuss the eRMIONE solution in greater depth; examining current findings and next steps; and presenting a practical demo by the owner of the platform, European Dynamics (Greece).