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The aim of SemCloud is to build a next-generation context-aware service platform able to operate directly at the semantic level. Traditional service platforms incorporate semantics as a way to allow a more powerful interaction among services and to automate some tasks, but in the end, they always serialize their interactions using non-semantic technologies using grounding operations.

SemCloud pretends to investigate and develop a prototype of a middleware to allow native semantic operation of services, in which they are grouped forming a service cloud in which interactions among services are not directed towards a specific endpoint, but instead defined at a semantic level and routed from one node of the cloud to another using semantic reasoning. Using this approach, a node of the cloud which needs to perform a computation or access some data, does no longer needs to first find a server or data provider, using a discovery mechanism over a directory, and then perform a binding to the service/data provider in order to properly interact.

In SemCloud, a node will release to the cloud a service/data request, and using semantic reasoning over that request, it will be routed towards a node able to answer it. This approach will therefore allow the higher levels of the service platform to operate at a pure conceptual level defined by the semantic abstraction. In particular, SemCloud will develop end user tools to allow service composition at this conceptual level: a user may define a service to retrieve football matches video replays and forward them to his nearest screen. Thanks to the semantic routing and the built in context-awareness capabilities, at execution time the cloud will automatically find the service representing the nearest screen to the user. In a traditional service cloud, this will instead imply discovering the appropriate service, performing the binding and generating a new service script each time a new video has to be played.