SWAN is a small, fast-moving project over 2 years, involving four partners from three EU countries and pre-accession state. The consortium comprises 3 world-leading research institutions specialising in three main disciplines: semantic repository technology, human language technology and semantic web services. The fourth participant is an SME (small or medium enterprise) which has developed a number of successful products and applications on the basis of the above technologies. Consortium members are also among the key players in a number of standardization efforts both at the W3C consortium (Semantic Web) and ISO (human language technology).