The mission of TripCom is to take a significant move towards a new era of the Internet. The Internet was invented in the 1960’s and provides a highly decentralized and scalable architecture for enabling large networks of computers beyond the boundaries of other communication protocols. The first major evolution step appeared around 20 years later with the wide-spread usage of email. Email changes the communication processes of humans significantly by providing instant communication over any geographical distances in an asynchronous fashion based on the message-exchange paradigm. The second major evolution step appeared another 10 years later with the wide-spread usage of the World Wide Web. The Web changes communication processes of humans significantly by providing instant publication over any geographical distances in an asynchronous fashion. It is based on broadcasting via persistent publication of information.

The two major asynchronous styles of human communication (directed communication via mail and undirected communication via publication) have been significantly improved through email and Web. The next step for the Internet is likely to be the direct integration of applications and computers via Web service technology. This network no longer directly interlinks humans but interlinks applications and programs to provide integrated services to the human end-user. However, current Web service technology has only very little to do with the Web. It is based on the message exchange paradigm similar to email communication. Truly Web-enabled Web services will communicate via persistent publication of information.

Realizing this vision and a new technology is the mission of TripCom with the result of the integrating Tuple Space, Semantic Web (triple), and Web service technologies. To this end, we on the one hand plan to improve Tuple Space technology by adding semantics and means to structure and relate tuples in a scalable and linkable Triple Space architecture. On the other hand we plan to improve Web service technologies by adopting the flexible and powerful asynchronous communication model of Tuple Spaces. Furthermore we plan to improve business data exchange standards by use of our new technology and demonstrate the usefulness of this approach in several practical use cases. Finally, we plan to establish a proper security and trust model for the Triple Space to ensure safe communication and data handling, as well as distributed trust models. As the result of the project the combination of these building blocks could give ground to a novel Semantic Web service paradigm.

Like the Web changed the networking of humans from email exchange to persistent publication, our plan is to revolutionize the networking of machines.