A european union research partner collaboration creation system

The construction of an appropriate consortium for a European Union (EU) research project is a complex and time-consuming procedure. This paper proposes the creation an EU research partner collaboration creation system to provide a more efficient way of selecting partners. The system is comprised of a service oriented architecture (SOA) and, via a web platform, provides researchers with a means of finding actors in the research ecosystem who could be potential partners in an EU project. The location of the appropriate partners is accomplished by mapping research actors to a profile ontology. To facilitate the partner selection process we propose the use of request based virtual organizations (RBVOs), i.e. flexible clusters of organizations which could perform the required research tasks.