The EU-funded ACE-GIS project (IST-2001-37724) (2002-2004) developed a set of Open Source Software (OSS) and commercial tools to support composition of web services within the area of geographic information services and electronic commerce services. The project started in June 2002 and was successfully completed in October 2004. SINTEF was responsible for technical coordination while the Norwegian Mapping Authority acted as the administrative coordinator. The tools were applied and tested in an environmental and an emergency management pilot application.

The tools developed are:

• Semantic-based Service Discovery Assistant. University of Münster (Germany). Existing Web Services described in WSDL were annotated with OWL-S to generate application and domain specific ontologies.  The discovery assistant was able to discover web services based on operations input and output parameters.
• UML-based model-driven development methodology and transformation tool (UMT). SINTEF (Norway). A UML/MDA based methodology was developed that allow developers to import existing web services into UML models, to compose web service operations utilising UML activity diagrams, and to generate executable specifications.
• Workflow engine with web service support. INESC-ID (Portugal). A java based workflow engine which is capable of executing the specifications generated by the UMT tool
• Conformance testing tools. University of Jaume I (Spain). A Java based tool for testing Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) implementations were developed. The WMS and WFS specifications can be found at OGC.
• Geospatial services and tools. Ionicsoft (Belgium). Extensions to the commercial Red Spider Studio tool which include catalogue services, buffer services, and WSDL oriented geographic information services were made.
• E-commerce tools. E-blana (Ireland). Provided payment and security services.

Pilot applications:

• Environmental assessment pilot. Norwegian Mapping Authority (Norway). A web-based application that allows users to select geographic data from various sources, do simple analysis, comment and generate assessment reports was developed.
• Emergency management pilot. E-blana (Ireland). A web-based application that allows emergency managers to plan and manage emergencies was developed. A central use case in this setting is the creation of a Gas Dispersion Map in case of a chemical leak.