The main scientific and technical objective of SWOP, and its primary deliverable, is a Semantic Web-based Open engineering Platform (SWOP) that will greatly improve complex product development (including both physical products and services), actual product customisation processes, and especially the intelligent link between them. This is illustrated in the following diagram:

              SWOP Platform Architecture

This platform will deliver a new and radical, but at the same time sustainable approach for ICT support in engineering of complex products. It will accomplish this by a tightly integrated combination of two main ‘state-of-the-art’ and high potential technologies: Semantic Web (SW) technologies and Genetic Algorithms (GAs). This combination will allow smart manipulation of semantic data for optimised product engineering processes involving multidisciplinary and dynamic work environments with multi-stakeholder involvement.

SWOP will enable product developers to specify their products parametrically. The result of this will be a product ontology that can represent a parametric product, an instance of which can be customised for a specific client/buyer, over the web or with professional help (e.g. a salesman).

The SWOP platform will provide generic tools that will be customised and validated through four business contexts.