nuin: a bdi agent framework for java

Welcome to the web site for Nuin: a Java framework for building belief-desire-intention agents, with a particular emphasis on Semantic Web agents. This site contains the current release versions of the Nuin code, documentation and other supporting material, including the ontologies used by the system.

Important news - current status

September 2006 I have not been working on the code development for Nuin for a while. I have, instead, been writing up my thesis. This has had a number of side effects, besides the obvious one that my output has been English rather than Java! The primary side-effect has been that I've been thinking quite a lot about the current architecture of Nuin. I've decided that the current design needs a radical overhaul. Nuin 2.0 is currently in the design and planning stages. The current generation code is not finished in places, and will not now be completed. I will take the good bits, and fix the broken bits, in the next version of the code.

what is nuin?

Nuin is being developed as a by-product of my PhD research at the University of Liverpool, under the supervision of Prof. Mike Wooldridge. My research interest is in seeing how users respond to, control, and delegate to autonomous agents. I want to build interesting, robust, complex agent behaviours for users to interact with. I started developing Nuin when I failed to find a suitable programming tool for building such agent behaviours. In particular, at the time I began Nuin, there weren't any publicly downloadable tools that allowed an agent designer to program with the abstractions of extant agent theories, such as beliefs, goals, intentions and joint-intentions, etc. Since my interest is specifically on agent behaviours and user interaction, Nuin is not an agent infrastructure tool at the agent society level. One of Nuin's strengths is that it is designed with the goal of working with different infrastructure services, either agent specific or more general infrastucture such as web services.

Initially, I didn't plan to make Nuin a Semantic Web tool. However, since my research in my other life is focussed precisely on the Semantic Web, it became more and more appropriate to combine them. Exacly how deliberative agents should work with semantic web technologies is still evolving.

requirements

Nuin in written in Java, and requires JDK 1.4 or later.

is it free?

Yes. The Java source code and scripts are freely available under a BSD-style Open Source license.