Welcome to the Development Portal of the SEALS Project!

Semantic technologies are at the heart of the future Web providing ways to express knowledge and
data so that it can be properly exploited. These technologies will empower a new class of Information
and Communication Technologies much more scalable, interoperable, and with a higher degree of
process automation support that will fulfil the needs of an emergence market that will exceed $10
billion by 2010.

This is a very active research area, currently supported by more than 3000 individuals integrated in
360 organisations which have produced around 700 tools, but still suffers from a lack of standard
benchmarks and infrastructures for assessing research outcomes. Due to its physically boundless
nature, it remains relatively disorganized and lacks common grounds for assessing research and
technological outcomes.

The goal of the SEALS project is to provide an independent, open, scalable, extensible and sustainable
infrastructure (the SEALS Platform) that allows the remote evaluation of semantic technologies
thereby providing an objective comparison of the different existing semantic technologies. This will
allow researchers and users to effectively compare the available technologies, helping them to select
appropriate technologies and advancing the state of the art through continuous evaluation.

The SEALS Platform will provide an integrated set of semantic technology evaluation services and
test suites. They will be used in two public and worldwide evaluation campaigns. The results of these
evaluation campaigns will be used to create semantic technology roadmaps identifying sets of efficient
and compatible tools for developing large-scale semantic applications.

The semantic technology evaluation services will initially be available for five different types of
technologies (ontology engineering tools, storage and reasoning systems, matching tools, semantic
search tools, and semantic web service tools) and for different evaluation criteria (interoperability,
scalability, etc.). The platform will provide easy and free access to the evaluation services and to the
results of the evaluations performed.

Other links

For information about the SEALS evaluation activities, see the SEALS Community Portal

SEALS is co-operating with the STI International Test Beds and Challenges Service