MACE: INTEGRATED ACCESS TO ARCHITECTURAL CONTENT DURING LEARNING

Finding the right information has never been an easy task. Before the Web, information resources were hard to locate and reach. In present times, however, digital contents about all fields of life are just a few clicks away, yet their discovery through the increasingly complex maze of available on-line resources can be a very time-consuming effort. Traditional general-purpose search engines look at these resources as conceptually independent Web documents. Indexing as many as they can reach, they store the limited information about them that enables a basic keyword search. The MACE project [1] sets out to demonstrate the benefit of describing already existing contents about the specific domain of Architecture, Building Technology and Construction with semantically well defined metadata (information about those contents), in order to make them more accessible, usable and exploitable, especially during learning activities. It does this by providing unique search services over different types of metadata both, harvested from the on-line sites hosting the contents, and created within the MACE infrastructure.