DERI International is a collaborative organization of research institutes worldwide that are committed to the realization of the semantic web and semantic web services through collaborative and open methods and in accordance with the five fundamental DERI Premises: first, a core technology in support of problem solving environments; second, a conceptual model for service-oriented computing (Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO)); third, Web Service Modeling Language (WSML) a family of languages that provides formal semantics for WSMO models; fourth, a Web Service Execution Environment (WSMX) that supports reasoning and mediation in WSMO compliant solutions; and fifth, Triple-Space Computing, a new communication paradigm for services based on the Semantic Web paradigm. This document provides DERI’s motivating vision, its five fundamental premises, and the first steps in defining DERI International.