Creativity is a long cherished and widely studied aspect of human behavior that allows us to re-invent the familiar, and to imagine the new. Computational creativity (CC) is a newly burgeoning area of creativity research that brings together academics and practitioners from diverse disciplines, genres and modalities, to explore the potential of computers to be autonomously creative, or to collaborate as co-creators with people. We describe here an architecture for creative Web services that

more »

... act as a force magnifier for CC, both for academic research, and for the effective deployment of real CC applications in industry. For researchers, this service-oriented architecture supports the pooling of technologies in a robust interoperable framework, in which CC models are conceived, developed and migrated from lab settings to an industrial strength platform. Industry developers, for their part, will be able to exploit novel results of CC research in a robust, low-risk form, without having to re-implement algorithms from a quickly moving field. We illustrate the architecture with the first of a growing set of creative Web services that provide robust figurative language processing on demand. Category: Smart and intelligent computing