"The 24-month EMPOWER project proposes an innovative framework and the enabling technologies that will allow the European Software SMEs to create their next generation, loosely-coupled, interoperable and easy-to-integrate Commercial-off-the-Shelf software products, leveraging the quality of the application software and the integration services delivered to their customers. The EMPOWER project will, finally, result in: R1 & R2: An innovative EMPOWER Reference Framework and Adaptation Environment that enables the European Software SMEs to ad-hoc define and extract pieces of functionality from their legacy systems, implementing a semantic service-oriented private adaptation layer upon each of their software products. R3: the EMPOWER Ontology that constitutes the corner stone of the semantic adaptation of the enterprise services exposed from given proprietary software products; R4: the Enterprise Interoperable Services Semantic Map that constitutes the semantically-enriched, abstract documentation of the interoperable pieces of functionality defined per each type of business software applications; R5: five (5) EMPOWER SMEs-specific Prototypes that will validate and prove the concepts and software components and tools of the proposed EMPOWER project; R6: the EMPOWER Adoption Guidelines that will constitute a semantic service-oriented analysis and adaptation cookbook for the development of the next generation, interoperable and easy-to-integrate software products; and R7: wide-scale dissemination and exploitation of the project results to the European Software SMEs market (with special focus on the emerging enlarge-Europe software industry). Led by LOGO, the consortium consists of eight partners from six EC member states and associated countries, including software development SMEs, industrial companies and research centres."