The symposium »Living with Information: Architecture and Visualization« (October 16 , 2009 at FH Potsdam) will juxtapose experiences and results from the MACE project with thoughts and design approaches from practitioners in the fields of design, architecture and technology. Guided by five central questions, we will explore future trends in information visualization, the relationship of visualization tools and creativity plus issues like information over– and underload.

I am really looking forward to the unique speaker combination we put together:

• Miguel Cardoso from bestiario,
• Paolo Ciuccarelli from Politecnico Milano /density design,
• Georgi Kobilarov from FU Berlin / dbpedia,
• Norbert Palz (CV + info) and
• Andrew Vande Moere from infosthetics.com!

In addition, Prof. Boris Müller and I will provide a rear-mirror view and outlook of our activities related to the MACE project… A wide spectrum, but hopefully all held together by the central issue of the workshop and the five questions we prepared for the speakers.

Hope to see you there – register soon — space is limited!

On a related note, the Potsdam–based W3C office opens on the day before, which should be quite interesting, too.

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!