Agtivity | Advancing the Science of Software Agent Technology

Software Agent Technology Glossary

by Jack Krupansky

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We do not yet have a formalized 'glossary' for the vocabulary or ontology of software agent technology, but we do have a very substantial collection of the terms and phrases that could eventually form the basis of such a glossary.

We also have a list of terms that are related to software agent technology, but don't have the word "agent" in them.

My goal is to refine the vocabulary that is used to refer to software agent technology. This vocabulary would evolve as a distributed, open dictionary in which participants can add their own definitions and new terms as well. Ultimately, the dictionary (vocabulary) could be the foundation for a full-blown ontology for software agent technology. The goal is not to detail specific ontologies or approaches to how specific software agents communicate, but how we think and talk about the many aspects of software agent technology.

The terms and topics on this list were culled from web searches, the agent mailing list, and articles in the press.

Eventually I would like to see this list evolve into four entities: 1) a taxonomy (or taxonomies) for software agents that would enable us to classify software agents, 2) a meta-ontology for software agents to describe the many characteristics of software agents and how we discuss them and how we talk about how agents themselves talk to and about each other, 3) the public and marketing terminology that frequently has vague, ambiguous, and changing meaning, and 4) community and contextual terminology for referring to the processes by which software agent technology is researched, developed, standardized, marketed, deployed, and used, including legal, social, economic, political, and security issues. In the first two cases, the 'we' should include not only researchers, developers, and users, but also computer programs which seek to identify, reason about, and engage in discourse about software agents in an automated manner. The third case includes journalists, informal technologists, public policy makers, non-technical management, and the general public. In some cases technical terms can and should be used for both their correct technical meaning and for non-technical consumption, but researchers and practitioners in the field should endeavor to shy away from the casual, sloppy non-technical terminology whenever possible. There may in fact be three levels of technical terminology usage: 1) precise technical terms, 2) informal technical terms and jargon, and 3) non-specific, broad allusions and notions.

Some terms are simply topics or applications, but we do want to capture those as well. It may be that many of those terms belong in outer-level ontologies.

Some terms are simply specializations or applications of other terms, but I think this is important to capture the full flavor and richness of the field of software agents.

Some terms may even be misnomers or otherwise inappropriate, but still capture the flavor of the usage and can offer "preferred" terms.

I would like to see all of this evolve in the direction of a distributed, open dictionary, in which only the terms themselves are centralized (but mirrored and cached), but anyone can add definitions or vote on definitions so that the dictionary can evolve over time in an open, decentralized manner. Each term and definition would have attributes so that the viewer could select the "view" that that wish depending on their needs. Wiki pages superficially seem attractive, but the current technology leaves a lot to be desired. I think of Wiki pages as semi-decent display technology, but not providing a sufficiently robust database technology. Unfortunately, the heart and soul of a Wiki page, the unstructured web page text editor, is inappropriate for structured glossary editing.  For now, I manually do the database structuring in my head. It may be that a hybrid, with a structured language and structured editor for supporting the ontology of glossary definitions is the way to go.

In order to fully capture the meaning of many terms in the domain of software agent technology it is necessary to refer to or include concepts and terms from related domains. Even excluding domain-specific applications of software agent technology, related domains include:

Let me make explicit a critical caution: Although researchers and early adopters can work quite successfully with loose terminology since everybody knows what everybody else "means", that imprecision can be a fatal flaw once the circle of discussion broadens to "the unwashed", whether they be corporate executives, public policy makers, lawyers, or simply technical management who haven't been steeped in all the early jargon and mystique of software agents.

Some issues:

No attempt has been made to structure or cull this list other than than to sort it alphabetically.

Click here for web usage statistics for common software agent terms.

Now, here's the list of terms:

Foreign Language Terms

Extra Links

These are here simply as alternate search forms in case the user searches for these particular phrasings in quotes.

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Updated: July 31, 2009 09:49:54 AM -0400

Copyright © 2009 John W. Krupansky d/b/a Base Technology