MACE: Deliverable 5.5 - Integration of Competence Metadata

The MACE infrastructure is a highly distributed system, currently being developed by several consortium partners at different locations and in principle open to everyone. The infrastructure is and will be developed with the interests of the following groups in mind: - the content providers, connecting their repository to MACE in order to make their contents more accessible, - the content consumers, in different situations who use MACE to get better results for their searches, and - the technical developers, creating new widgets and solutions on top of the existing infrastructure. For all these groups, good programming interfaces to MACE are an important concern. By defining clear, stable and easy-to-use application programming interfaces, MACE enables: - the content providers, to connect to MACE by implementing a Harvesting and a DirectLink interface, - the content consumers, to search for and acquire contents on the MACE portal, also by using provided compact, embeddable interface components (so–called ”widgets”) at other sites, - the technical developers, to create new solutions and widgets by supporting them with defined and documented web services, that allow access to the metadata collected.