MACE: INTEGRATED ACCESS TO ARCHITECTURAL CONTENT DURING LEARNING

The Communication from the European Commission "EDUCATION & TRAINING 2010" THE SUCCESS OF THE LISBON STRATEGY HINGES ON URGENT REFORMS [1] points out that the knowledge-driven society and economy the world walks towards demands higher investment in human resources, and this is driving Lifelong Learning (LLL) to become increasingly important – "Confronted with a likely extension of the average length of working life and ever more rapidly occurring economic and technological changes, people will have to update their competences and qualifications increasingly often. At the same time, the knowledge society generates new needs in terms of social cohesion, active citizenship and personal fulfilment, and the answer to this lies solely in education and training".

It happens in regular teaching environments as well as in learning modes during and after graduation that knowledge is out of date within five years, and grows so fast that regular teaching ‘in school’ cannot cope with this knowledge boom in a comprehensive way. Therefore academic teaching evolves into teaching of principles, methods and attitudes, into a state of mind allowing LLL.
Subjects for LLL are produced by universities, by practice and by industry. They are disseminated via conferences, short courses and more and more via e-learning formulas. Today, subjects for learning are prepared by specialists, somewhere on earth, and disseminated via electronic means amongst distant users; e-repositories play a role of growing importance in this context.

In the domain of Architecture, Building Technology and Construction, a huge amount of digital contents and references useful to academic and professional users is available on line and in principle accessible from all over the world. However, because they reside in many unconnected and heterogeneous repositories, these contents are often hard to find with traditional search engines. The eContentPlus [2] project MACE – Metadata for Architectural Contents in Europe (2006-2009) [3] – sets out to connect architectural repositories, providing a framework for community based services such as finding, acquiring, using and discussing about architectural contents that were previously reachable only to small user groups. Contents are richly described with different types of metadata used by cutting-edge tools that provide a guided faceted search and suggest additional content possibly interesting in the user’s current context.

This document describes the achievements of the MACE project in terms of conceptual and technological tools developed to provide integrated access to architectural contents during the learning practice.

[1] http://europa.eu/eur-lex/en/com/cnc/2003/com2003_0685en01.pdf
[2] http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/econtentplus/index_en.htm
[3] http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/econtentplus/projects/edu/mace/index_en.htm