There are nine semantic web related projects among the numerous development projects aiming to shape the future of the Internet, which are listed in a study issued yesterday by the Commission of the European, titled “The Future of the Internet, A Compendium of European Projects on ICT Research Supported by the EU 7th Framework Programme for RTD”.

SENSEI – Integrating the Physical with the Digital World of the Network of the Future
This is an Integrated Project in the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme, in the ICT Thematic Priority of Challenge: Pervasive and Trusted Network and Service Infrastructures. One of the awaited results of this project is an open service interface and corresponding semantic specifications to unify the access to context information and actuation services offered by the system for services and applications. The duration of the project is January 2008- December 2010. Total costs are EUR 24m, of which EC contribution is EUR 15m.


MOMENT – Monitoring and Measurement in the Next generation Technologies
The main objective of the project is to design and implement a mediator architecture offering a unified interface for monitoring and measurement services, able to use all data and functionalities from the existing and future measurement infrastructures. The project consortium has partners from Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Sweden, Greece, Italy, Spain and Israel. The MOMENT platform will provide a middleware or mediation engine that serves not only to provide a common unified interface to monitoring applications, but also to provide taxonomy of such monitoring services, and semantic based querying capabilities. One of the key issues of the project is the protocol that serves for the applications to perform semantic queries to the mediation engine through the query interface using web services. The duration of the project is January 2008- December 2010. Total costs are EUR 3.907,689 m, of which EC contribution is EUR 2.800,363 m.


SOA4All – Service Oriented Architectures for All
Computer science is entering a new generation. The emerging generation starts by abstracting from soft ware and sees all resources as services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA4All will help to realize a Web of billions of services, a world where billions of parties are exposing and consuming services via advanced Web technology. The outcome of the project will be a comprehensive framework and infrastructure that integrates four complimentary and revolutionary technical advances into a coherent and domain independent service delivery platform of which one is Semantic Web technology, a means to abstract from syntax to semantics as required for meaningful service discovery. Duration of this project is 36 months, starting from 2008-03-01. Total costs are: EUR 13.648.488,19


SERVFACE – Service Annotations for User Interface Composition
The project ServFace will extend service-oriented architecture concepts with an integrated approach of user interface description and development by introducing the notion of a correspondent user interface for services. Objective 4 of this project: Runtime platform and Web service technology standard extensions. The technological basis of ServFace will be web service standards which we see as the base for service-oriented approaches. Advances in web service technologies will be achieved regarding to the semantic description of service functionality, service operations and operation parameters, and the integration of user interface descriptions in existing standards. An appropriate runtime platform will be developed and implemented supporting the technological extensions for interactive and adaptive services. The duration of this project: 30 month (02/2008 – 08/2010). Total cost: EUR 4.078.175.


SHAPE - Semantically-enabled Heterogeneous service Architecture and Platforms Engineering
The objective of the SHAPE project is to provide a powerful environment and standard for service modeling, to support the specification and realization of enterprise systems based on a Semantically-enabled Heterogeneous service Architecture (SHA). SHAPE will provide an open source implementation of the UPMS service modeling standard from OMG, with extensions for SHA. SHA extends SOA (Service-oriented Architecture) with semantics and support for heterogeneous architectural styles, including Web Services, Agents, SESA (Semantically enabled Service Architectures), ERP services, P2P, Grid and Components, under a unified service-oriented approach, to form a new and better basis for meeting the business requirements of enterprise wide systems.

Th e SHAPE project will provide MDE tools and –platform for SHA systems, based on UPMS (UML Profile and Metamodel for Services) and the UPMSHA (UML Profile and Metamodel for Semantically-enabled Heterogeneous service Architectures) that will be extended from that. An initial focus on web services and JEE will be extended with support for semantic web services, based on WSMO (Web Services Modelling Ontology) and the concept of SESA – (Semantically-enabled Service Architectures) – that also will be related to the other metamodels and technologies. Duration of this project: 30 months from 1.12.07. Total cost: EUR 5.7m.


SERVICE Web 3.0
Even after four decades of rapid advances, computing is currently subject to revolutionary changes at all levels, including hardware, middleware, network infrastructure, but more importantly intelligent applications. Emerging technologies such as the Semantic Web or Web services transform the Internet from a network of information to a network of knowledge and services. The number of services which will be offered on the Internet is expected to rise dramatically in the next few years. Semantic we related focuses of Service Web 3.0 will be:

• to support standardization activities for semantic service descriptions;
• to organize different types of events ranging from scientific conferences to industry-oriented tutorials on topics related to semantic computing;
• to provide information material such as white papers, feasibility studies, showcases and promotional movies to disseminate semantic technologies to the industry. This will introduce new business models and systematically facilitate Semantic Web services and Semantic Web technology adoption, in particular for SMEs;
• to set-up dedicated cross-project clusters focusing on Semantic Web services and semantically-enabled Service oriented Architectures, and exploit synergies.

Thematically, activities within the project Service Web 3.0 are focused around the integration of three mainstream technologies: Web, Service-oriented Architectures and Web 2.0, and their extension into semantics as a means to achieve interoperability and scalability.
Duration: 24 months: January 2008 to December 2010. Total cost: EUR 721,273


VICTORY - Audio-Visual Content search and retrieval in a distributed P2P repository
In light of three dimensional object retrieval evolving from text annotation to content-based and from standalone applications to web-based search engines, the creation of a search engine for 3D and multimedia distributed content into P2P and mobile P2P networks, is proposed. Driven by the very successful concept of Wikipedia, the first goal of the proposed project is to create the first distributed Visual Object Repository in which any peer can contribute to.

The main differences between VICTORY and any known knowledge repository, is that, firstly, any visual information will be described as MultiPedia object (3D object along with its accompanied information - 2D views, text, audio, video), and secondly, the distributed nature of the repository. VICTORY’s main objective is to create a MultiPedia search engine based on the 3D objects. The user will be able to use as input any Multipedia object or a combination of them. The retrieved content will contain 3D objects and their accompanied mixed-media and it will be accessible from both mobile devices and standard PCs. The search engine will be based on a combination of novel algorithms able to extract 3D low- level geometric features and high-level semantic features using relevance feedback and annotation techniques which are expected to improve significantly the retrieved results.

Furthermore, the search engine will be enriched by multimodal personalized interfaces so as to take into account the users’ interests and to offer capabilities of matching between 2D/3D objects, sketches and text. In conclusion, the VICTORY project aims at developing: Distributed 3D content and context-based search engine, P2P and Mobile P2P collaborative network, Unified distributed access, Community neighbourhood identification, 3D visualization on handheld devices, Multimodal interfaces (text, 2D images, sketches, 3D), Copyright protection. Execution of the project is 01/01/2007 – 30/06/2009. Total cost: EUR 3.87m of which EC contribution is EUR 2.20m.


COIN - Enterprise Collaboration & Interoperability
The mission of the COIN IP is to study, design and develop an open, self-adaptive, generic ICT integrated solution to support the above 2020 vision, starting from notable existing research results in the field of Enterprise Interoperability and Enterprise Collaboration. COIN will develop services for semantic, web-enabled business documents interoperability; for Knowledge interoperability and for Business models and policies harmonization and combination. Duration of this project is 48 months. Total cost: EUR 14.38m.


iSURF - An Interoperability Framework for Collaborative Planning
This project will develop knowledge-oriented inter-enterprise collaboration tools for European SMEs to enable them to be more agile, self-sustainable and responsive to the changes in the supply chain. An open smart product infrastructure will be developed to collect supply chain visibility information and an interoperability service utility will be provided for seamless exchange of planning documents.

iSURF project will provide a Semantic Interoperability Service Utility for achieving the semantic reconciliation of the planning and forecasting business documents exchanged between the companies according to different standards. This component will be based on UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification. iSURF project proposes to use a Service Oriented Architecture: semantically enriched Web services will be used to interact with the underlying business processes and to wrap the existing legacy applications to solve the interoperability problem. Duration: 30 months. Total cost: EUR 3.13m.