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The growing needs to access information in remote, mobile environments have sparked interests in so-called In-Vehicle Telematics Systems (IVTS). These relatively new systems have the potential to deliver computing facilitates to road vehicles, which may include in-vehicle infotainment, route-guidance and navigation and the provision of vital information resources used by fleet haulage companies and emergency services (police, fire and ambulance). This paper describes the EmergeITS project, which is concerned with the use of IVTS for emergency fire service applications. In particular, the paper describes a distributed service-based architecture, based on the Jini middleware technology, which can be used to provide fault tolerant application services to remote in-vehicle computers and mobile devices such as Palm devices and WAP phones.