SWING aims at deploying Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology in the geospatial domain. In particular, we address two major obstacles that must be overcome for SWS technology to be generally adopted, i.e. to reduce the complexity of creating semantic descriptions and to increase the number of semantically described services. Today, a comprehensive knowledge of logics, ontologies, metadata and various specification languages is required to describe a service semantically. We will develop methods and tools that can hide the complexity - and automate the creation - of the necessary semantic descriptions. The objective of SWING is to provide an open, easy-to-use SWS framework of suitable ontologies and inference tools for annotation, discovery, composition, and invocation of geospatial web services. SWING builds on the DIP and SEKT IPs, by adopting, combining and reinforcing their results. A main key to the solution is adapting the SWS technology of DIP to handle geospatial services and content. Another key is utilising and advancing the technology of SEKT to annotate geospatial services with semantic information. A targeted synergy between these two research initiatives are demanded to maintain and extend Europe's leading role in SWS. The SWING framework and pilot application will increase the use of distributed and heterogeneous services in geospatial decision making. The results can be reused in other domains and will boost the availability of semantic services and bring the vision of the SWS a great leap forward. Exploitation of SWING's results will provide Europe's decision makers and citizens with a new paradigm of information retrieval and new business opportunities.

The mission of TripCom is to take a significant move towards a new era of the Internet. The Internet was invented in the 1960's and provides a highly decentralized and scalable architecture for enabling large networks of computers beyond the boundaries of other communication protocols. The next step for the Internet is likely to be the direct integration of applications and computers via Web service technology. This network no longer directly interlinks humans but interlinks applications and programs to provide integrated services to the human end-user. However, current Web service technology has only very little to do with the Web. It is based on the message exchange paradigm similar to email communication. Truly Web-enabled Web services will communicate via persistent publication of information. Realizing this vision and a new technology is the mission of TripCom with the result being based on the integration of Tuple Space, Semantic Web (triple), and Web service technologies. To this end, we on the one hand plan to improve Tuple Space technology by adding semantics and means to structure and relate tuples in a scalable and linkable Triple Space architecture. On the other hand we plan to improve Web service technologies by adopting the flexible and powerful asynchronous communication model of Tuple Spaces.