Virtual Organisation Theme Projects and Roadmap

1
Virtual Organisation Theme Projects and Roadmap

• The VO theme brings together research and
  technologies needed to build and operate VOs in a
  practical, cost-effective manner. In particular,
  it focuses on
• Technology middleware providing services to
  participant organisations. These will help a
  group of separate entities to behave like a
  single organisation
• Social and cultural issues differences in
  organisational culture can present barriers to
  integrated working. Understanding these
  barriers, and how to overcome them, is vital.
• Legal issues highly dynamic VOs present a number
  of new legal challenges, such as how contracts
  may be formed and enforced within very short time
  periods.
• Deployment/provisioning issues all organisations
  employ different technologies, configured in
  different ways and have different requirements.
  Furthermore, all virtual organisations
  potentially differ. Setup and evolution can
  therefore be highly complex and time-consuming.
  It is vital that these issues be addressed if the
  uptake of VO technology is to be assured.

VO Theme Projects
GOLD is an EPSRC e-Science Pilot Project
involving Newcastle and Lancaster Universities
and industrial partners including SOCSA,
Codeworks, Britest and Unisys. It is developing
middleware to support the building and management
of VOs, initially within the chemicals industry.
GOLD middleware allows a dynamic coalition of
separate parties to behave as a single
organisation. In particular, this includes

• Security participating in a VO requires sharing
  of information and other resources, potentially
  with competing organisations. It is vital that a
  dynamic and flexible security system underlies
  all VO transactions

• Trust trust is a basis of all enterprise. It
  can be encouraged within organisations by
  hierarchy and enforceable rules and between
  organisations by contracts. In VOs, this might
  be impossible due to lack of rigid structure, so
  middleware is needed to mediate trust.
• Coordination organisations working together to
  achieve common goals must be able to coordinate
  their activity. This is difficult to achieve
  across organisational boundaries
• Information management to work effectively
  together, organisations must share information.
  In a VO, information may be hard to locate and
  access. A dynamic information management
  framework is required to remedy this.

CRISP is funded by the DTI Technology Programme
to investigate the deployment and provisioning of
VOs. Even with effective middleware, it may be
difficult to build and manage VOs. Every
organisation employs different technology
configured differently and so creating a secure,
reliable environment for collaborative working
might require disproportionate effort in a
dynamic environment. CRISP will develop a
proof of concept showing that off-the-shelf VOs
are feasible and can be practically managed.
VO Theme Roadmap
The VO theme brings together a number of
technologies and research associated with
supporting VOs throughout their entire lifecycle.
To this end, a roadmap has been developed for
planning purposes. Some of the items on this
roadmap are being addressed by current projects.
NEReSC will secure funding to address the
remaining issues in the future.
Lifecycle
QoS
Dynamic Deployment
Data discovery
Organisation structures
Service provisioning
Resource discovery
Organisation culture
Control abstractions
Workflow
Delegation
Notification
VO evolution
Audit
Authentication
Authorisation
Organisation behaviour
Management tools
Resource Partitioning
Information Management
Dynamic policies
Access Control
Contract Management
Resource federation
Data federation
Data provision
Addressed by a current project
Future work