In recent years there has been a growing proliferation of user-generated Internet content. This increasing trend has led to an abundance of intermediaries (e.g. YouTube, Flickr, BitTorrent, etc.) which is expected to grow in the future with massive live content generation (e.g. TV channels, SopCast, etc.) The problem is that, currently users need to know the content location a priori and content has to be typically searched through the relevant intermediary. As a result, a lot of content tends to be accessible only by particular user communities.The COntent Mediator architecture for content-aware nETworks (COMET) will take a unified approach to content location, access and distribution, irrespectively of the intermediary used. COMET will introduce a global naming scheme and will optimise both content source selection and distribution, by mapping the content to the appropriate network resources based on transmission requirements, user preferences, and network state.Content and network-aware mapping will consider current, evolutionary and revolutionary network approaches. The architecture will address two key aspects:a) Global content naming and addressing, with supporting infrastructure for search and content name resolution to the relevant identifiers required for access, andb) unified access and user-, content- and network-aware distribution by mapping the content onto the appropriate network resources through supporting infrastructure, providing content- and network-aware access to every type of content through all possible types of distribution.The COMET content plane aims at becoming a global QoS-aware unified content access mechanism, essentially a content-wrapper around the Internet that shields the user from access details. The COMET project will identify relevant requirements, draw a complete architecture, research and specify required mechanisms, build prototypes, conduct validating experiments, and demonstrate the COMET content plane operation.