SodaBot: a software agent environment and construction system

Abstract

Introduction In this extended abstract, we argue that software agents should be written using a vocabulary not provided by traditional programming languages --- it should be possible to create agents solely by specifying their abstract behavior. Motivated by this position, we introduce SodaBot, a general-purpose software agent user-environment and construction system. Its primary component is the basic software agent --- a computational framework for building agents which is essentially an agent operating system. We also present a new language for programming the basic software agent whose primitives are designed around human-level descriptions of agent activity. Via this programming language, users can easily implement a wide-range of typical software agent applications, e.g. personal on-line assistants and meeting scheduling agents. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award Grant No....