The main INFRAWEBS project focus and objective is the development of an application-oriented software toolset for creating, maintaining and executing WSMO-based Semantic Web Services (SWS) within their whole life cycle.

This next generation of tools and systems will enable software and service providers to build open and extensible development platforms for web service applications. These services will run on open standards and specifications, such as BPEL4WS, WSMO, WSMX, WSML, SPARQL, RDF, etc. In particular, they will be compliant with WSMO (Web Services Modelling Ontology), a W3C initiative in Semantic Web services.

The systems generated will consist of loosely-coupled and linked INFRAWEB units, with each unit providing tools and adaptable system components. Developers will be able to use these components to analyse, design and maintain WSMO-based Semantic Web services across the whole lifecycle.

These Semantic Web services offer a new dimension in collaborative work and service production, service provision and service maintenance in run-time environments.

In the first step, the INFRAWEB units are being used to establish an open development platform for SMEs and industrial vendors.

INFRAWEBS represents a novel approach to problem solving in the creation of SWS applications. It involves a tight integration of similarity-based (non-semantic) and logic-based (semantic) reasoning.