The MONET project is a two-year investigation into mathematical web services funded by the European Commission, as part of the Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme of the Fifth Framework. The project started on 1st April 2002. The long-term aim (beyond this project) is to weave together the emerging world of web services-the semantic web-and grid computing, in that we aim to deliver sophisticated mathematical problem analysis and the code to compute the answers, for which grid services will be required, in a common open agent-based framework for the description and provision of web-based mathematical services. The short-term aim of this project is proof of concept. That is to demonstrate a framework consisting of a set of example mathematical web services together with a brokering platform used to discover and invoke these services given a query by a user to solve a particular problem.