MACE: Deliverable D7.6 - Report on user interface design and community experiments

This deliverable presents the progress of the user interface design and community building experiments within the MACE project. In Chapter 2 we generally present the interface of the MACE portal, which is a platform to discover and enrich architectural resources and, at the same time, to support the community formed around architectural topics. Besides the advanced search, the portal provides various visual tools for metadata based search and browsing, tailored to architectural needs (see Chapter 3). Different metadata widgets are used to visualize and access multiple dimensions of each resource, as presented in Chapter 4. These widgets not only establish meaningful cross–connections between resources, but also invite to add and edit metadata effortlessly. In order to generate a critical mass of metadata and ensure sustainability of projects’ outcomes, supporting community and fostering end user contributions are critical. In Chapter 5, we present the components deploied in this direction as well as an analytical framework for incentive mechanisms. Within the dissemination strategy, the MACE project has got a unique chance to raise its public awareness at La Biennale of architecture in Venice, 2008. In this context we designed an interactive installation, demonstrating, in an exhibition setting, the benefits of resource interconnection via metadata (see Chapter 6). Chapter 7 presents our preliminary conclusions and an overview of planned future activities

User Interface Design

As detailed in Chap. 1, system implementations for dynamic taxonomies and faceted search allow a wide range of query possibilities on the data. Only when these are made accessible by appropriate user interfaces, the resulting applications can support a variety of search, browsing and analysis tasks. User interface design in this area is confronted with specific challenges. This chapter presents an overview of both established and novel principles and solutions

MACE – Enriching Architectural Learning Objects for Experience Multiplication.

Stefaner, M., Dalla Vecchia, E., Condotta, M., Wolpers, M., Specht, M., Apelt, M., Duval, E. (2007) MACE – Enriching Architectural Learning Objects for Experience Multiplication. In: Duval, E., Klamma, R., & Wolpers, M. (eds.) EC-TEL 2007. LNCS 4753; Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; pp. 322-336.Education in architecture requires access to a broad range of architectural learning material to develop flexibility and creativity in design. The learning material is compromised of digital information captured in textual and visual media including single images, videos, description of architectural concepts or complete architectural projects, i.e. digital artifacts on different aggregation levels. The repositories storing such information are not interrelated and do not provide unified access so that retrieval of architectural learning objects is cumbersome and time consuming. In this paper, we describe how an infrastructure of federated architectural learning repositories will provide unique, integrated access facilities for high quality architectural content. The integration of various types of content, usage, social and contextual metadata enables users to develop multiple perspectives and navigation paths that support experience multiplication for the user. A service– oriented software architecture that is based on open standards, and a flexible user interface design solutions based on widgets ensure easy integration and re- combinability of contents, metadata and functionalities

MACE: Joint Deliverable "Evaluation of the MACE system"

Stefaner, M., Wolpers, M., Memmel, M., Duval, E., Specht, M., Börner, D., Gruber, M., De Jong, T., Giretti, A., & Klemke, R. (2009). MACE: Joint Deliverable "Evaluation of the MACE system". MACE-project.This deliverable presents the evaluation results of the MACE project1. MACE integrates large amounts of technology enhanced learning contents and metadata in the domain of architecture, in order to create a framework for the integration of multiple content sources, content enrichment with different metadata types, and improved access to these existing contents.MAC