MACE – “Metadata for Architectural Contents in Europe” is a research project financed by the European Commission within the “eContentplus” program, a European Union initiative to make digital architectural content in Europe more recognizable, accessible, selectable on the base of shared and dynamic ontology, reusable within multiple university education and life-long learning curricula for professional user. The European Institutions in the domain of architectural Education are developing an increasing range of initiatives to develop ICT applications for their institutional Courses, Libraries, Archives. Parallel important initiatives are being developed by private entities as architectural design studios, portals and projects archives where design documentation, iconographies are stored. But the prevailing characters of the actual European scenario of Architectural Education and related E-Learning services are:
- the lack of a common reference ontology based on agreed rules and
- the indexing and encoding taxonomies are heterogeneous, non cross-recognisable through shared thesauri of terms, of which only standard- referring subsets are addressable
- a great number of learning or information objects accessible from the web are not indexed by a standard format metadata

MACE’s CONCEPTION:
The main assumptions of MACE is that the expert knowledge sets of a number of stake holders, protagonists in the architectural domain, have to perform as the back-bone of the desired boundary-less repository of architectural knowledge, to be shared by the members of a world-wide community of users. Thence MACE initiates the proposition of a commonly shared ontology, terminology, series of concepts structured in a domain index, conceptual maps for the representations of the dense tissues of relationships connecting the multiform and trans-disciplinary contents of architecture.

THE OBJECTIVES:
Its main objective consists of the content enrichment of a huge quantity of knowledge resources dedicated to architectural education all over Europe, already expressed in the digital form, thence eventually available to a vast audience of students, teachers, professionals, researchers through the web. The aims of MACE concern the definition of a number of users’ profiles, based upon the nature of their practice as stakeholders operating in the architectural domain: user profiles the designated requirements of whom have to be compared with the access path to selected learning objects in the web-connected repositories. MACE proposes the structuring of content enrichment network system, aimed at making available the possibly largest majority of Architectural knowledge repositories accessible by a selective federated search, based upon conceptual indexing. MACE aims at quantifying the quality of the metadata necessary for the description of a significant digital content in E-Learning (Learning Object) sample essentially from the semantic point of view. The idea is applying search indexing taxonomic modalities developed by MACE for metadata to a reality that is culturally and multidisciplinary differentiated, as regards to architecture and the architect's activities, toward a wider scenario of disciplinary scopes. The aim of the research strongly tend to integrate urban and public space design, town and territory planning, that are very interesting and difficult to theoretically categorize within the metadata map developed in MACE application profile.