We recently launched a whole new ver­sion of the MACE por­tal. MACE (Meta­data for Archi­tec­tural Con­tents in Europe) is a pan-european ini­tia­tive to inter­con­nect and dis­sem­i­nate dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion about archi­tec­ture. The idea is to con­nect and enrich var­i­ous data­bases con­tain­ing eLearn­ing mate­r­ial for archi­tec­tural con­tents and to con­nect and make them acces­si­ble in novel ways. The project is co-funded by the Euro­pean com­mis­sion. If you are more inter­ested in the back­ground of the project, you can also view our info page here. Per­son­ally, I am work­ing half of my time on this project here at FH Potsdam.

So, let me give you a lit­tle overview of the por­tal:

MACE users can search for con­tents in our faceted search appli­ca­tion (using elas­tic lists, of course :). Con­tents can be fil­tered by ori­gin, lan­guage, media type, expert clas­si­fi­ca­tion and competencies.

Alter­na­tively, the por­tal offers a radial tree visu­al­iza­tion of the clas­si­fi­ca­tion tax­on­omy that can be used to tra­verse the hier­ar­chy and find asso­ci­ated con­tents. It was built using flare, and I added some extra-nice splines and a bread­crumb branch.

Upon click­ing the header of a search result, users get to the MACE detail page, a pretty rich wid­get patch­work for dis­play­ing and edit­ing the avail­able meta­data. It dis­plays not only basic infor­ma­tion such as lan­guage, descrip­tion, usage rights etc., but also allows to asso­ciate con­tents with loca­tions, clas­si­fi­ca­tion terms, com­pe­ten­cies, per­sonal tags, rat­ing and com­ments. The same page can be reached from a con­tent by using the MACE book­marklet, allow­ing users to tag and remem­ber or find related con­tents while browsing.

By analysing the text of resources, we auto­mat­i­cally detect per­sons and archi­tec­tural projects. We keep the focus to archi­tec­ture by addi­tion­ally query­ing dbpe­dia to make sure we actu­ally found per­sons and build­ings of rel­e­vance in the archi­tec­tural world. Dbpe­dia also pro­vides the meta­data for these “real world objects” as well as some pretty well-picked flickr images via their flick­r­wrappr script. If you are not famil­iar yet with the dbpe­dia project, be sure to check it out, these guys are up to something.

Finally, users can find their own resources, or expect those of oth­ers, on each user’s own page. It dis­plays not only all resources and tags asso­ci­ated with the user, but also a per­son­al­ized, auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ated “intro text” char­ac­ter­iz­ing the person’s activ­ity on MACE.

I am respon­si­ble for con­cept and styling of the por­tal UI, imple­mented all the flash parts like the elas­tic lists and the hier­ar­chi­cal visu­al­iza­tions and also a decent amount of the crazy Javascripts dri­ving the site. For me, it was the first major HTML/CSS/JS project in a long time, and apart from the usual frus­tra­tions with large code bases in dynamic lan­guages, I really enjoyed work­ing on it, and espe­cially learn­ing jQuery, which is almost like a new pro­gram­ming lan­guage on its own. Very interesting.

We will try and improve on the por­tal over the next 6 months, and also get a bit more exper­i­men­tal now that all the tech­nol­ogy is in place.

If you have any feed­back or sug­ges­tions, drop us a line or start a thread on our get­sat­is­fac­tion page! And if you are inter­ested the project and the page, make sure to reg­is­ter to get most out of it!