OAA® News
What's happening in the world of OAA...
To get to the release pages, click here.
The changes from previous versions are summarized in greater detail here.
To get to the release pages, click here.
OAA, as part of the Clarissa Procedure Execution Assistant, arrived on the
International Space Station
(ISS) on Christmas day, 2004. The software was launched by
Progress 16
from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on
The changes from previous versions are summarized in greater detail here.
To get to the release pages, click here.
The OAA Contributions page:
http://www.ai.sri.com/oaa/contributions/
now includes an agent which
provides an OAA query service for relational databases. The design of the agent was inspired by the JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) API and provides similar functionality for OAA users.
Many thanks to Mark Johnson (of SRI) for primary authorship of this agent, and to Peter Jarvis (also of SRI) for helping to make it available!
* Macintosh support does not yet include the C library. (We expect the C library Mac support to be completed in the full release.)
New users are strongly encouraged to start with this Beta version rather than using version 2.2. It is essentially the completed 2.3.0 release, except for the additional work that is planned on the C library, to make it usable on the Macintosh, and several other minor changes.
To get to the new release pages, click here.
The changes from previous versions are summarized here.
Although several other issues and desirable new features have been identified recently, we've decided to include those changes in the next major version, which we expect to release later this summer.
Thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions and helped identify problems!
To get to the new release pages, first select "Documentation & Distribution" (left frame, from the OAA Home Page), then click on "ACCESS the OAA 2.2 Distribution Pages".
The changes from version 2.2.0 are summarized here.
A beta version of OAA 2.2.1 (runtime only) is now available. Because it contains no major changes from 2.2.0, the beta period is expected to be short (2 - 3 weeks).
Please feel free to try out this beta release, and report any difficulties you may encounter. Such reports are very helpful to us in maintaining high quality in the course of evolving OAA.
The changes from version 2.2.0 are summarized here.
The release, available for Unix (Solaris and Linux) or for Windows, can be downloaded from here.
The OAA Contributions page:
http://www.ai.sri.com/oaa/contributions/
now includes an agent which provides access to WordNet, the lexical
reference system provided by Princeton University, which is widely
used by computational linguists, researchers in various
other areas, and system builders.
This agent is used with the WordNet Prolog Database Package, which is freely downloadable from the WordNet Web site. The agent code, written in Prolog, can be used with either Quintus or Sicstus Prolog.
Many thanks to Chris Culy (of SRI) for authoring this agent, and to Peter Jarvis (also of SRI) for helping to make it available!
The OAA Contributions page:
http://www.ai.sri.com/oaa/contributions/
now includes a Google-access agent, which makes the Google Web APIs
service available to other agents. That is, it allows agents to request
keyword searches and get the results back from Google, via normal OAA
mechanisms. (The request is simply an OAA "solve" call, and the
results come back as ICL terms.)
The Google Web APIs service is described here:
http://www.google.com/apis/index.html
Using the service requires you to create a Google account (and is associated with certain license restrictions), which can be done for free on the Google site.
Many thanks to Peter Jarvis (of SRI) for providing this!
To get to the new release pages, first select "Documentation & Distribution" (left frame, from the OAA Home Page), then click on "ACCESS the OAA 2.2 Distribution Pages".
See below (Sept. 15) for a summary of new features.
A major new release of OAA, version 2.2.0, is being prepared for release later this month. This release will incorporate a wide variety of new features, optimizations, bug fixes, and improvements to documentation. In response to requirements generated by the BioSPICE program, special emphasis has been given to message-passing optimizations, in support of the exchange of large data between agents, as well as rapid-fire message exchange.
Changes from version 2.1.0 are summarized here.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is supporting research on computational models of intra-cellular processes and systems, coupled with the development of a variety of enabling technologies and analytical tools for research biologists. SRI's Open Agent Architecture will provide the program's software interoperability infrastructure, supporting the construction of a community of bioinformatics components.
For additional information, visit the BioSPICE Public Web Site.
This agent provides the implementation of time triggers (one of the four types of triggers defined by OAA documentation). Although the other 3 types (communication, data, and task triggers) have been implemented since the initial release of OAA 2, time triggers have not been functional heretofore.
See The Alarm Agent Information Page for complete details.
In addition, there are a wide variety of improvements, optimizations and fixes, spanning the facilitator, all of the libraries, and several of the sample agents.
A complete summary of changes from version 1.0.12 can be found on the Version History page, and documentation for the new agents can be found on Documentation for Individual Agents. Many thanks to all the users who have made valuable suggestions and code contributions!
NOTE: the new archiving software configuration, and the organization of the archives, are still being refined. Before long, a search capability and better means of sorting the messages should be available. But the entire archives is once again available, at long last.
You can access the archives via the Contact & Community page.
See previous issues of The OAA News.