Description

MOSAIC is a tool for assessing whether governments and local authorities comply with UN recommendations on small arms and light weapons.
It is being used by governments, international organizations and researchers around the world to improve small arms and light weapons (SALW) control.

United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research: The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) is a Geneva-based autonomous institute within the United Nations that has served as a bridge between the research community and Member States since 1980. Its work, conducted under the Conventional Arms and Ammunition Programme, focuses on enhancing control over conventional weapons and ammunition to reduce human suffering and promote global security.

The Scope of Work: Our goal was to create a complete replacement for an outdated Adobe AIR application that had been in use for nearly 20 years and served a similar function within the UN. The client used this opportunity not only to modernize the technology but also to redefine and clarify the application’s requirements. As part of this process, they gave us considerable freedom to design the entire system architecture and user experience.

Product Development: The three-tier architecture consists of a React/Redux frontend for the UI, an Electron main process that manages windows and proxies file I/O via IPC, and a co-located Express server backed by SQLite that handles criteria data, user authentication, and reading/writing .mosaic files (which are ZIP archives), all running locally on the user's machine with no external network dependencies. We chose this architecture to create a modern, maintainable, self-contained desktop application that works reliably in secure or offline environments, while clearly separating the UI, system integration, and data layers. Everything runs locally on the user's machine, supports several languages and exports results for further analysis.