IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit

About this document

This document describes the IBM Agent Building Environment Architecture and the IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit, Level 5, concentrating mainly on the portion of the architecture that is currently implemented. It describes at a high level the frameworks or components that are currently available for experimentation and initial development purposes. It describes the remaining documentation material, with suggestions for task-oriented reading.

If you are interested in some of the initial design points, thoughts on future direction, etc. you can read more of the high level architecture and design material in the Appendix.

The emphasis of the IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit is to assist in the problem of integrating intelligent agents into existing, as well as new applications by providing a structure of existing frameworks or components, as well as the interfaces for logically extending them to the requirements of your application. Specific samples are provided to both test the design and to illustrate and demonstrate the current toolkit capabilities. In many cases the samples are also used in tutorial material for increasing your understanding. Additional tutorials and samples are expected with the release of future levels of the toolkit.


Documentation Organization

For convenience of printing and accessing information, the documentation has been broken into three separate books. The following briefly describes each document in the Level 6 of the IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit Library:

Trademarks

The following terms are trademarks of the IBM Corporation in the United States or other countries or both:

AIX
C Set ++
IBM
OS/2
VisualAge

The following terms are trademarks of the Microsoft Corporation in the United States or other countries or both:

Visual C++
Windows
Windows NT

Borland C++ is a trademark of Borland International, Inc..

Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Summary of Changes

Level 6

The following is a summary of changes made to the Level 6 of the IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit.

  1. A number of changes to the Time Adapter:

  2. There is a new AGENT:CONFIG event that is initiated by the agent before the AGENT:STARTING event and before agent start(). This event makes it easier to configure adapters through rules that are conditioned on this event. Refer to "RemAgent - Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit Agent Configuration" of the User's Guide book and Chapter 3. "Adapter Reference Material" of the Components and Adapter Reference book.

  3. The implicit call to the adapter reset function has been removed from loadConductSet() of IAAgent, unloadConductSet() of IAAgent, as well as the loadCS/unloadCS commands of the sample agent program. Instead reset of a selector is available more flexibly as a separate agent service (method and command). Refer to Chapter 2. "Agent Reference" of the Components and Adapter Reference book and "Start Up Options for the Sample Agent Programs" of the User's Guide book.

  4. JDK 1.1 is required and expoited for better performance. Jar files are provided in place of zip files.

  5. Completed support for Microsoft Visual C++ (adding support for the IALibrary and associated Library objects).

  6. Support for the Borland C++ compiler is added.

  7. A complete agent (Reminder Server) sample program is added to illustrate almost all aspects of the Agent and Library component application programming interfaces. This also illustrates many of the new functions listed above (new Time Adapter effectors, AGENT:CONFIG event, etc. Refer to Chapter 3. "Agent Server Sample" of the User's Guide book.

Level 5

The following is a summary of changes made to the Level 5 of the IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit.

  1. The agent interface (the interface for initializing and controlling the agent) now supports Java as well as C++. A sample Java agent is also added.

  2. Real numbers are supported as terms for rules/facts.

  3. Rule and Atom parsing improvements: more and better messages, escapes characters, allow for underscore and numerics in symbols etc.

  4. New Time Adapter effectors.

  5. Documentation reoganized to make material easier to locate and navagate.
Additional changes affecting rules/programs that used earlier levels:

  1. Version management added to Library objects affects format of rules format by running the cvtrules utility. See the READ.ME file for details.

  2. Sample Adapters renamed. See samples directory.

Level 4

The following is a summary of changes made to the Level 4 of the IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit.

  1. In addition to previously supported platforms, IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit now runs on AIX.

  2. Conduct sets can now be loaded or unloaded into the agent while the agent is running. In previous versions, conduct sets could only be loaded into the agent during the start-up procedure.

  3. Changes to different classes in the adapter interface, including IAAdapter, IAAtom and IAFactSet.

  4. Changes have been made to the DLL structure toolkit, requiring changes to any makefiles used to build C++ adapaters.

  5. Change in the format of the LIBRARY statement in the configuration file used by the IAAGENT.

  6. Change to the library component, changing the way library objects are created and destroyed.

  7. The user can now control the type of logging done by the RAISE engine.

Level 3

The following is a summary of changes made to the Level 3 of the IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit.

  1. Supported C++ compilers for developing adapters are:

  2. There have been several changes to different classes in the adapter interface, including IAAdapter, IAAtom and IAFactSet.

  3. A new adapter called File is included.

  4. Two additional classes have been added to the library. These classes are IALibLogRecord and IALibLogRecordSet.

  5. Only the Java version of the Generic Rule Editor is provided.

  6. Logging of inferencing episode by the RAISE engine can be controlled by the user.

Level 2

The following is a summary of changes made to the Level 2 of the IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit.

  1. In addition to OS/2, IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit now runs on Windows 95 and Windows NT.

  2. Adapters can be written in either C++ or Java. A new sample adapter called StockAdapter written in Java, is provided with this version.

  3. A Java version of the Generic Rule Editor is provided.

    Note: The old version of the Generic Rule Editor is still available for OS/2 in this version of the IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit. However, it is our intention to stabilize that version and continue development only on the Java version of the Generic Rule Editor.

  4. The following incremental enhancements have also been made:

    1. The HTTP Adapter methods can now be invoked before the adapter's Start member function is invoked. This means that the AGENT:STARTING event can be used to invoke any of the effectors on the adapter.

    2. The SampMail adapter has a new effector: EMailRelayHostIs. This effector is only useful on Windows platforms; see the SampMail read.me file for details.

Table of Contents

About this document

  • Documentation Organization
  • Trademarks
  • Summary of Changes
  • Level 6
  • Level 5
  • Level 4
  • Level 3
  • Level 2
  • Introduction to IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit

  • IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit Structure and Architecture
  • Component Application Interfaces
  • IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit Primary Architectural Principles
  • Supported Platforms and Components
  • Platforms Currently Support by the IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit
  • Current IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit Components
  • What can I Do with the Current IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit?
  • Guide for Reading The IBM Agent Building Environment Developer's Toolkit Documentation
  • Appendix A. Architectural Notes and Design Points

  • Agent Design Model
  • Component Specialization
  • Open Integration
  • Easy Development
  • Adapters
  • Adapter Examples
  • Adapter Design Points
  • Engines
  • Engine Examples
  • Engine Design Points
  • Knowledge
  • Knowledge Examples
  • Knowledge Design Points
  • Library
  • Library Examples
  • Library Design Points
  • Views
  • Views Examples
  • Views Design Points
  • Summary
  • Appendix B. Frameworks in General

  • Engine Framework
  • Description
  • Types of Engines
  • Chainer
  • Executive
  • Analyzer
  • Monitor
  • Compositions
  • Simple Composition
  • Reflective Composition
  • Hybrid Composition
  • Complex Composition
  • Knowledge Framework
  • Library Framework
  • Conduct Set Objects
  • Access Library Objects by Name
  • Knowledge Interchange Format
  • Learning Objects
  • Logs
  • Object Metadata
  • View Framework
  • Interaction with other Frameworks
  • Adapters
  • Library
  • Design Criteria
  • Components
  • Rule Authoring
  • InstructionDialog
  • InstructionDialogEngine
  • ContextListFrame
  • RuleTemplate
  • InstructionListFrame
  • EndUserLabelDictionary
  • CommonTermsDictionary
  • Appendix C. Glossary



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