Cloud4SOA focuses on resolving the interoperability and portability issues that exist in current Clouds infrastructures and on introducing a user-centric approach for applications which are built upon and deployed using Cloud resources. To this end, Cloud4SOA aims to combine three fundamental and complementary computing paradigms, namely Cloud computing, Service Oriented Architectures and lightweight semantics to propose a reference architecture and deploy fully operational prototypes.The 36-month Cloud4SOA project will result in:R1. The Cloud4SOA Cloud Semantic Interoperability Framework, which will provide a set of recommendations and good practices on how to achieve semantic interoperability between different Cloud platforms.R2. The open, generic Cloud4SOA Reference Architecture, which will introduce a scalable, reusable and transferable approach for facilitating the design, deployment and execution of resource intensive SOA services on top of semantically interlinked Clouds.R3. The Cloud4SOA lightweight models for resources and services which will offer the necessary semantics for annotating computing resources and SOA services.R4. The Cloud4SOA platform as a reference implementation based on the Cloud Semantic Interoperability Framework and the Cloud4SOA Reference Architecture.R5. Three showcases which will validate and prove the proposed Cloud4SOA architecture, models and tools.R6. Wide‐scale dissemination and exploitation of the project results to the European academic, scientific and business stakeholders and end‐users organizations through the formulation and active day-to-day support of a broad Community of Practice or Interest Group on Cloud Semantic Interoperability. The goal of this group will be to raise Cloud Interoperability related issues to international standardization bodies (e.g. W3C, OASIS)Led by ATOS, the Cloud4SOA consortium consists of nine (9) partners, from six (6) EU member states, i.e. Spain, Ireland, Greece, Germany, Portugal and Romania.