Towards a Virtual Organisation for Computational Intelligence

The N2Grid system is a collaborative environment for researchers in the area of neural network providing access to world wide distributed specialized software and hardware resources, as neural network objects and paradigms, corpuses of information and knowledge, and computational power. This paper presents a gap analysis and a blueprint for extending N2Grid towards a Virtual Organisation for Computational Intelligence. Thus we have the vision to provide a worldwide spanning collaborative system delivering knowledge and computing resources to all scholars and professionals tackling problems in Computational Intelligence, from connectionist systems to artificial intelligence. We start by collecting definitions of the term Virtual Organisation of different research communities. Then we continue by comparing existing Virtual Organisations in different research areas based on their specific functionalities, identifying similarities, and defining specific common characteristics. Based on these findings, finally, we perform a gap analysis listing strengths and weaknesses of N2Grid and design an functional specification for a Virtual Organisation for Computational Intelligence (VOCI).