Virtual Organizations By the Rules

Increasingly, collaborative activities in science are using the concept of virtual organization as an organizing principle. One benefit of viewing these collaborations from an organizational perspective is that there is a long history of studying how organizations can be structured to function effectively. Many of these organizational principles have been reflected in the design of enterprise architectures and the use of service oriented architecture concepts as an implementation vehicle for capturing these organizational constructs. One approach to meeting organizational requirements in systems architecture has been to express organizational structure in terms of business roles, business processes and business rules. To date however, this type of analysis and associated infrastructure tools has not been applied in any consistent way to the concept of virtual organizations and their associated scientific applications. In this talk, the author explores these established approaches to business IT systems and their applicability to the virtual organizations that are being created to support scientific endeavors. As an example, I will describes how data management policies for virtual organization can be expressed as business rules, and implemented via existing business rules engines.