IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit
Glossary terms are defined as they are used in the toolkit library.
- adapters
- Used to relate applications to the agent and its engines,
and provide actions that are needed by the agent to carry out
its work in the application world. See adapter domain below.
- adapter's domain
- An adapter tries to represent one part of
the outside world to the engines,
which is referred to as the adapter's domain.
Adapters tell the engines about
changes in their domain, answer questions about their domain and
perform actions in their domain at the engine's request.
- agenda
- Internal form of rules used by an engine. This form represents
optimizations, rule normalization, and sensor binding. It may
involve atom resequencing, therefore logging of inferencing
activity by the engine
and some engine diagnosics may reflect such reordering.
- alarm
- Rather then defining their own scheduling system and the
accompanying
rule editing, other adapters rely on the time adapter to schedule alarms.
Alarms are set as a result of rule inferencing. When an alarm fires,
it is reflected by an trigger event that is generated by the Time
Adapter and can cause other rules to fire.
- antecedent-expression of a rule
- Logically implies the consequent-expression of the rule.
The antecedent and consequent expressions are built from logical atoms.
- atom
- A part of a rule or fact. Consists of a predicate and a list of
terms.
- atomicity
- Concept of completing a logical operation or defined set of
operations without interruption by another asynchronous
thread or process. Some form of locking is generally needed to
accomplish this.
- boolean sensor
- A sensor that returns simply true or false.
Requires a fully bound term list. Also see sensor.
- client
- Client is used in the broad sense, to include
anyone, anything, or any group on whose behalf
specific rule inferencing is done.
- collector
- An object used to group or collect inferencing
material for storage and later retrieval. It usually represents
a particular client or user, group of users/clients, or similar
logical grouping. Collectors relate to each other hierarchically similar
to directories.
- conduct set
- A named set of inferencing materials, generally a set of rules
and optional set of long term facts with the same name as the
set of rules. Is associated with a collector where the inferencing
material is stored. Can also be associated with a selector that can
can cause the conduct set to be applied to a particular trigger event.
- consequent-expression of a rule
- The part of a rule that "fires" when antecedent-expression
(conditional part) of a rule is satisfied (evaluated as true).
- derived facts
- Atoms that exist in the consequent of a rule that has
been fired successfully (is true because the antecedent of the
same rule is true), so the atom(s) in the consequent
are also true.
- effector
- An action or service defined by an adapter. Can be used as an atom
in the consequent in the consequent of a rule to cause the interpreting
engine to invoke the owning adapter to perform the prescribed action/service.
- E-mail adapter
- Demonstrates how to write and adapter in C++
by providing a basic way to send e-mail.
- engines
- An agent component that is driven by trigger events from adapters to
interpret rules, scripts, or similar instructional material, yielding
appropriate actions through effectors and their owning adapters.
- event
- See trigger events.
- event notification
- Each adapter watches for significant
events in its domain and uses event notifications (trigger events)
as input to the engine(s) and their interpretation of rules or
similar instructional material.
- file adapter
- Triggers events based on changes to files
and allows manipulation of files to which it has access.
- fact
- An atom that is used to evaluate or interpret rules to determine the
truth of its antecedent expression. See derived facts, short term facts,
long term facts, and fact pool.
- fact set
- A set of facts
- fact pool
- The collection of all facts for an inferencing episode that are used
to evaluate rule antecedents for that inferencing episode. Made up of
derived facts, short term facts, and long term facts.
- inferencing episode
- Inferencing that is initiated and scoped by a particular trigger event.
It begins when the trigger event arrives and ends when all of the
applicable rules have been evaluated for the current set of facts
(fact pool).
- HTTP adapter
- Triggers events based on use of the World Wide Web.
- KIF
- Knowledge Interchange Format. For inference engines involves
an evolving standard linear format for storing rules and facts.
- library
- A component that manages the caching and
persistent storage of the agent knowledge (intelligence of
the agent through which it makes decisions and takes actions on
behalf of the client/user.
- log-record-sets
- A collection of records containing information about what
the agent has done for the user. It may involve either engine or
adapter activities. A separate log-record-set can be kept for each
client or other "Collector" (see collector).
It is useful for monitoring of inferencing activity,
debugging, accounting, auditing, etc.
- non-boolean sensor
- A sensor that has least one free variable in its term list and returns
sets of values for each binding (by adapter) of the free variables
in its term list.
- long term facts
- Facts that persist beyond the current inferencing episode
and are stored persistently.
- metadata
- Information or attributes that are associated with an object.
Standard metadata is system defined and maintained through specialized
object methods. User-defined metadata is defined by the application
and associated with particular persistent objects to allow the application
record its unique interpretation of the associated object and that objects
standard attributes.
- NNTP adapter
- Triggers events based on USENET News actions.
- predicate
- A symbol for a relation between objects or a property
of an object, specifically for the particular object(s) in the
term list that follows the predicate in the same atom.
- rule editor
- Allows for convenient and easy-to-use user
interfaces, GUIs, templates, etc. to enter rules and
modifiy existing rules. Typically rule
editing is oriented to a specific application, affording the
user-known terminology and a familiar context for rule formulation.
- rule set
- A named group of rules that are stored persistently and loaded
used for inferencing.
- rules
- An application-defined logical expression, consisting of antecedent
expressions that are evaluated for truth, and consequent expressions that
are implied true when the antecedent of the same rule is true.
- selector
- A symbol that can be associated with inferencing material, e.g. conduct
sets such as to condition their applicability to particular event types. A
selector is provided (optionally) as part of an event header by the originating
adapter. A selector can have a filtering effector on which rules/facts are
applied to a trigger event.
- sensor
- An query honored and defined by an adapter and invoked by an engine.
Engine invocation is based on rule evaluation of antecedent atoms that
have been designated as sensors.
- short term facts
- Atoms with bound terms, that are used to validate and/or
assist in evaluation of rules, but are not directly a part of the a
rule. Short term facts
originate from adapters through trigger events or sensors.
Unlike long term facts, short term facts are not stored persistently or
created through rule editors.
- Stock adapter
- Demonstrates how to write an adapter
in Java by providing a basic way to fetch stock quotes from a web site.
- symbols
- Part of a rule or fact. Can be a type of term or a predicate.
- term
- One of a set of optional parts of an atom. They are the objects of
the atoms predicate. Terms can be one of several types, such as string
and integer.
- Time adapter
- An adapter that manages alarms. Alarms are set by effectors of rules
and cause trigger events to be originated by the Time Adapter when the
alarm goes off.
- trigger event
- An asynchronous event supplied by an adapter to cause inferencing
activity by engine(s). It is triggered when the adapter recognizes an
interesting activity or event in its domain.
- Utility adapter
- Used for string manipulation and mathematics.
- version management
- Serialization of write operations by managing object versions.
The version is incremented
for each persistent storage change and used to determine if an
intervening change has occured before the current change is applied.
Supported by the agent Library component.
- views
- Provides the basis for interaction between the application or
user and the agent (including the agent's Library).
A type of interaction is the definition of rules to accomplish what the
application or user requires the agent to do.
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