Semantic technologies are at the heart of the future web and are a cornerstone in current computer science. These technologies support the construction of intelligent applications in different domains: business, education, e-government, tourism, health care, etc. More specifically, these technologies support information search, integration and interchange by enhancing the meaning of such information. However, semantic technologies must be efficient and robust to support their current and future use in a continuously changing environment where the information available in the Web is exponentially growing.

The goal of the SEALS project is to develop an infrastructure - the SEALS Platform - that provides services for the evaluation of semantic technologies. Such platform will be available to anyone interested in evaluating semantic technologies or in knowing about the results of current tools, namely, researchers, developers and end users.

Besides this, the SEALS project will organise a set of international evaluation campaigns over different types of semantic technologies with the goal of providing a discussion forum about semantic technology evaluation and objective evaluation results for the most relevant existing technologies.

Because of the evaluation services provided by the SEALS Platform, researchers will be able to ground their research on objective and replicable evaluation results and to share and discuss their results with others.

Furthermore, the consolidated results of the different semantic technologies obtained in the evaluation campaigns will support the nowadays difficult tasks of selecting the appropriate semantic technologies for different uses and of obtaining improvement recommendations that facilitate the use and development of such technologies.

The SEALS project, funded in the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) under the topic of e-Infrastructures, is co-ordinated by Ontology Engineering Group at the UPM's School of Computing and includes researchers from other nine European universities and research centres from Austria, France, Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

The SEALS project started in 2009 and will end in 2012. It will be composed of two phases where different evaluations will be defined, implemented in the SEALS Platform, and used in evaluation campaigns. Currently it is in the middle of its first phase and the first evaluations over semantic technologies have been defined.

The long-term goal of the project is to have a research infrastructure sustained by a community around the evaluation of semantic technologies.