EAAE is an official dissemination partner in the MACE project.


The MACE project sets out to transform the ways of e-learning about architecture in Europe. It will integrate vast amounts of content from diverse repositories created in several large previous projects as well as from existing architectural design communities.

MACE will provide a framework for community based services such as finding, acquiring, using and discussing about e-learning contents that were previously reachable only to small user groups. The project will build on top of several successful projects, including but not limited to DYNAMO, INCOM, WINDS, ARIADNE. In addition to that, three members of the consortium are main content partners who have access to a large number of content providers or are themselves associations of architects and universities dealing with architecture and design. Therefore the project reaches a critical mass of digital content that grants a significant impact on the EU scenario concerning architecture and cultural heritage, and will become a base for further community activity in these domains. The project will develop and use several types of metadata for tagging contents: traditional content metadata and ontologies, context metadata, competence metadata and learning process metadata, usage related metadata and metadata acquired through social interaction, e.g. recommendations by peer users or blog entries.

Close integration of universities as well as professionals ensures that demands from the user side are recognized and fitting solutions will be created. Since users are distributed across different countries in Europe, the project will address the multicultural and multilingual issues resulting thereof and create working solutions for sharing contents across borders.

Visit the official website of MACE at http://www.mace-project.eu


MACE is the acronym for ‘Metadata for Architectural Contents in Europe’ and the name of a project financed by the EU in the context of the ‘eContentplus’ programme.

The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft e.v. Sankt-Augustin (Germany) has introduced MACE as a project proposal to the EU on the subject of disclosing and enriching architectural learning e-contents throughout Europe. A consortium has been established (see above) in which, among others, K.U.Leuven is involved as owner of an on-line repository called DYNAMO, and EAAE - operated by K.U.Leuven - as the European network of and gateway to the schools of architecture. The project is aiming at building a software system which allows access and distant search in all repositories of electronic contents about architecture through Europe. Putting contents together can be done either by uniting databases or by virtually linking them. MACE goes for the latter option. It has the great advantage that the owners of the repositories keep their own data with the actual access rights. What has to be done, is to allow access to the repository in order to disclose its existing metadata and to collaborate in order to allow MACE to harvest these metadata. The first repository which will be introduced in the system is DYNAMO.

The project lasts for 3 years starting from 1 September 2006.

MACE is hoping that through our involvement in the EAAE, repositories will be found and become accessible. As each EAAE project is run by somebody from the EAAE and not by the EAAE itself, Herman Neuckermans from K.U.Leuven will function as project leader for this project (which is now officially running within K.U.Leuven without overheads). The benefits for the EAAE and its members are considerable: indeed members will have access to a wide variety of European databases relevant for the education in architecture and MACE will produce a search engine that can be used by all schools of architecture in Europe. There will be publications and an international EAAE conference on the subject of e-learning in the fall of 2008 or the spring of 2009. With this call we invite all owners of a digital repository with learning contents to contribute. If you feel able to contribute and/or if you know staff members in your school ‘owning’ such a repository related to education in architecture (librarians, chair of courses, on theory, history, design, construction,…) please (ask them to) contact us by e-mail at:
herman.neuckermans@asro.kuleuven.be


The first publication about MACE, entitled “Data and Metadata in Architectural Repositories” will be presented at the forthcoming CAADRIA2007 conference in Nanjing. It will be published in the proceedings of the conference. A preview can be found here.