In Architecture and Construction sector a large amount of information is created in different types of media: written documents, images, photos, sketches, drawings…, which are in general hard to index and find. On the other hand, most of the times this information resides in the people related to this discipline and the transmission of this knowledge becomes informal rather than formal. This context makes more difficult the task of tracking, sharing and exchanging not only knowledge but also information. For these reasons, non-expert designers and students spend a lot of time searching large number of cases similar to their actual situation, to get cues and suggestions on how to proceed.

Currently there are a lot of projects concerning architecture, construction and e-learning. In addition to these projects, universities, companies and other parties have created databases for architectural and construction content which have, in some instances, started to enrich them with metadata in order to make easier its classification and search. Despite the shared domain, all these architectural and construction content repositories are only lightly connected to each other and the integrated access to their contents is not realized at present. This is due to the different approaches in knowledge structuring (no common methodology or standards are employed) as well as the different content languages used.

To solve these problems the MACE project (Metadata for Architectural Contents in Europe), co-funded by the European Commission inside the eContentplus Programme, sets out to transform the ways of e-learning in architecture and construction in Europe. It will integrate vast amounts of content from diverse repositories created in several large projects in the past and build a framework for providing community based services such as finding, acquiring, using and discussing about e-learning contents that were previously not reachable. Furthermore, MACE aims at providing innovative tools to search, create content and enrich it with new metadata, which can be used to support different kinds of learning scenarios in architecture and construction education. Several kinds of metadata are used in these tools to provide different perspectives on the learning content, and find new ways to combine them. For teachers, it will become easier to find and organise appropriate content based on the competence, context, and process metadata provided.

In this paper the MACE infrastructure, the tools developed and the metadata applied are more extended. On the other hand, the domain standards analyzed as well as the taxonomies developed to represent the MACE information requirements are described. And finally, some examples of learning scenarios in building engineering and construction management education are exposed in order to understand the learning potential that MACE offers.