Abstract The Internet provides a ubiquitous, standards-based substrate for global communications of all kinds. Rapid advances are now being made in agreeing protocols and machine-processible message/document formats that will soon enable open application-application communication and brings about the prospect of ad hoc integration of systems across organisational boundaries to support collaborations that may last for a single transaction or evolve dynamically over many years. Effectively, we will witness on-demand creation of dynamically-evolving, scalable Virtual Organisations (VO) spanning national and enterprise borders, where the participating entities pool resources, capabilities and information to achieve common objectives. As a motivating example consider the following scenario (Figure 1). A team of engineers at a University is working on recommendations for a new aircraft wing. As a part of the work, researcher Alice needs to perform material analysis. This is conducted on line...