Computational Creativity Infrastructure for Online Software Composition: A Conceptual Blending Use Case

Computational creativity (CC) is a multidisciplinary research field, studying how to engineer software that exhibits behavior that would reasonably be deemed creative. This paper shows how composition of software solutions in this field can effectively be supported through a CC infrastructure that supports user-friendly development of CC software components and workflows, their sharing, execution, and reuse. The infrastructure allows CC researchers to build workflows that can be executed online and be easily reused by others through the workflow web address. Moreover, it enables the building of procedures composed of software developed by different researchers from different laboratories, leading to novel ways of software composition for computational purposes that were not expected in advance. This capability is illustrated on a workflow that implements a Concept Generator prototype based on the Conceptual Blending framework. The prototype consists of a composition of modules made available as web services, and is explored and tested through experiments involving blending of texts from different domains, blending of images, and poetry generation.