Fresh from the subversion repository, our new semantic agent project xOperator is now able to play with my local OntoWiki knowledge bases. The initial development to this tool will be done by Jörg Unbehauen as part of his master thesis.
xOperator tries to create a decentralized network of trust. Information is shared in the form of resources, which can be anything (even the information that you are selling your old washing machine). In a later stage it enables you to find friends of friends like centralized services, can already. At the end of the road, xOperator might even be able to find the best product for you without the normally necessary tedious internet research. Companies will be able to offer semantic annotated information about their products, giving the customer a new way of yet unknown price transparency.
Although xOperator is able to use any SPARQL endpoint out there, our main use case is to marry it with OntoWiki. Users should be able to use the agent just as an additional view to the knowledge bases of their OntoWiki installation.
To do this, it will be possible not only to ask the agent with special query languages like SPARQL but also to ask him with natural language. To achieve this, xOperator will map templates based on the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) to SPARQL queries and transform the XML result set to the instant message which will be send back to the user.
Implementation Status
The agent is able to log into existing accounts and can receive querying and configuration commands. The template based query generation is still a bit quirky. Queries can only be executed against locally configured data stores, the p2p part is not yet implemented.
If you’re interested in the project, please write to the public mailing list xoperator-public in our SourceForge area. The official homepage is http://aksw.org/Projects/xOperator