Abstract. 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 serviceoriented software architecture that is based on open standards, and a flexible user interface design solutions based on widgets ensure easy integration and recombinability of contents, metadata and functionalities.
We introduce Venice Unfolding, a case study on tangible geo-visualization on an interactive tabletop to enable the exploration of architectural projects in Venice. Our tangible user interface consists of a large display showing projects on a map, and a polyhedral object to browse these data interactively by selecting and filtering various metadata facets. In this paper we describe a prototype employing new methods to communicate territorial data in visual and tangible ways. The object reduces the barrier between the physical world and virtual data, and eases the understanding of faceted geographical data, enabling urban planners and citizens alike to participate in the discovery and analysis of information referring to the physical world.
Abstract. Social media technologies offer potential benefits for a variety of scenarios to support access to digital resources. The involvement of users that do not only consume, but also participate and contribute information, allows for promising approaches such as social browsing and crowdsourcing. Yet, a lot of resources and metadata are contained in distributed and heterogeneous repositories that follow a traditional top-down approach in which only experts can contribute information. A social hub that can aggregate such information, while at the same time offering social media technologies, enables new ways to search and browse these contents, and to maintain underlying structures. We will present how the ALOE system that realises such a social backbone was integrated into the MACE portal. First evaluation results provide evidence about the usefulness of the presented approach.
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