MACE: Connecting architectural content repositories to enable new educational experiences inside a collective external memory

In the practice and learning of Architecture and Civil Engineering, it is fundamental to access a big amount of learning material. A considerable part of the knowledge which once was written in books is now being moved to digital media. Today, most of the contents are produced and presented in digital format only. Spread around the world, digital content repositories containing a big amount of notions exist, but are oftentimes unknown and disjointed. As a consequence, they are not very efficient resources for learning at the moment. The European research project MACE (Metadata for Architectural Contents in Europe) aims at connecting digital architectural repositories by harvesting their metadata and enriching it through the integration of content and domain, context, competence and process, and usage and social metadata. The network created will allow for federated access and search over all connected repositories, allowing a new way of exploring notions and knowledge in the architectural domain, using the web as a "collective external memory