Chatting Agent
A chatting agent, or interactive agent is a computer application which interacts with the user in ordinary English language through a text-based messaging service, and provides various information, services, entertainment, etc., depending on its purpose and the directions in the flow of conversations.
The first multiple-purpose interactive agent was developed by Colloquis, and is called Smarterchild. Based on the success of Smarterchild, the script language "Buddyscript" was released together with a software development kit (SDK) for designing interactive agents devoted to be "expert" in particular areas. The Windows SDK contains an integrated developing environment (IDE) for designing agents in a quick a convenient way. In addition to that, the SDK includes the Buddyscript Server Developer Edition, which can be used to deploy agents for test purposes. The agents are browsing certain (pre-defined) web sources for the requested information, stores them internally in data tables and retrieves them when requested in a user friendly question-answering format. The "knowledge" of the agent is thus determined by the set of these sources. The extraction of information from the target webpages is carried out by looking for the relevant text patterns in the source code of the page.
In the context of space engineering, a chatting agent could behave as a "personal assistant" which could significantly help the work of a space expert. In terms of research support, it could be prepared to present, for example, general information in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology (a nice example could be the periodic table of elements), information and news stored at the ESA web portal, ESA space missions, web databases of satellites, Near-Earth Objects, etc.
During the summer of 2004 the ACT designed, configured and launched a test agent for space engineering. This test agent is called 'PlanetBuddy' and is able to do small conversations about the planets of the Solar System. The information sources of the agent were the NASA JPL pages listing the planetary orbital elements and physical properties.