German high-tech heavyweights SAP and Siemens are among the companies that hope to benefit from a government-funded program to develop new semantic Web technologies.

Both companies are in line for German government grants that the European Union approved last week for the Theseus program. SAP is the lead partner in a project that aims to develop semantic tools for enabling Web services based on service-oriented architecture (SOA) systems, while Siemens heads a team focused on semantic search technology for medical images, Theseus spokesman Thomas Huber said Wednesday.

"The companies view Theseus as a collaborative effort in the area of basic research, and a way to develop and bring new applications faster to the market," Huber said.

The SAP-led Texo project will work on semantic tools that allow software components in all types of businesses to communicate with each other and thus allow for new services based on SOA technology, said SAP spokeswoman Angelika Pfahler.

A new semantic Web-enabled service, for instance, could allow all home utilities, such as gas, water, electricity and communications, provided by different suppliers, to be monitored, altered or substituted electronically by the owner on the home PC.

"The ability to allow different systems to connect and communicate with each will enable many new business models," Pfahler said.

Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence are among the 11 partners participating in the Texo project.

Another Theseus project announced Wednesday is Medico, which is headed by Siemens. The project is focused on developing semantic search technology for medical images.

Despite advances, current medical image databases, such as the Picture Archiving and Communications System and the Radiology Information System, are still indexed by keywords assigned by humans and not by the image content.

The Medico team plan to study new intelligent image search engines that will, among other things, link images to a variety of semantic aspects, such as anatomical relationships between organs, genome data and disease models.

Theseus joins a growing worldwide effort to develop new semantic Web technologies, also called Web 3.0, to help consumers and businesses make better use of the countless words, images and sounds available on the Internet.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.