Abstract Recent progress in mobile broadband communication and semantic web technology is enabling innovative internet services that provide advanced personalization and localization features. The goal of the SmartWeb project (duration: 2004 – 2007) is to lay the foundations for multimodal user interfaces to distributed and composable semantic Web services on mobile devices. The SmartWeb consortium brings together experts from various research communities: mobile services, intelligent user interfaces, language and speech technology, information extraction, and semantic Web technologies (see www.smartweb-project.org). SmartWeb is based on two parallel efforts that have the potential of forming the basis for the next generation of the Web. The first effort is the semantic Web [1] which provides the tools for the explicit markup of the content of Web pages; the second effort is the development of semantic Web services which results in a Web where programs act as autonomous agents to bec...