  Creativity is a complex, multi-faceted concept encompassing a variety of
related aspects, abilities, properties and behaviours. If we wish to study
creativity scientifically, then a tractable and well-articulated model of
creativity is required. Such a model would be of great value to researchers
investigating the nature of creativity and in particular, those concerned with
the evaluation of creative practice. This paper describes a unique approach to
developing a suitable model of how creative behaviour emerges that is based on
the words people use to describe the concept. Using techniques from the field
of statistical natural language processing, we identify a collection of
fourteen key components of creativity through an analysis of a corpus of
academic papers on the topic. Words are identified which appear significantly
often in connection with discussions of the concept. Using a measure of lexical
similarity to help cluster these words, a number of distinct themes emerge,
which collectively contribute to a comprehensive and multi-perspective model of
creativity. The components provide an ontology of creativity: a set of building
blocks which can be used to model creative practice in a variety of domains.
The components have been employed in two case studies to evaluate the
creativity of computational systems and have proven useful in articulating
achievements of this work and directions for further research.
