Release notes for Nuin 0.2 - April 2004

This release of Nuin, the baseline technology release, includes the following key capabilities:

• core BDI agent architecture, modelled on AgentSpeak(L) and PRS, allowing agent designers to specify and implement agents using programming abstractions that correspond closely with the terms commonly used in intelligent agent theories.
• event mechanism as a means both of providing agent designers with a flexible agent architecture, and as a means of providing agents a common metaphor for sensing their environment - both external and internal.
• abstract knowledge representation based on predicate calculus logic, giving a common abstraction for a variety of KR formalisms that agents may come across, and providing the programmer with some assistance in integrating multiple KR schemes
• an interpreter which controls agent actions implemented via a common Java abstraction, together with a (user-extensible) library of built-in standard actions and library functions
• a plug-in service architecture providing a natural extension point for agent designers wishing to extend agent capabilities, together with a selection of built-in services including simple message passing for agents in the local Java VM, remote message passing via the Jade agent toolkit, basic I/O and basic white pages directories
• an initial approach at integration of semantic web capabities, including use of RDF/OWL as a knowledge representation, and the ability to use RDQL to query RDF-based knowledge stores.
• flexible agent configuration using an RDF agent specification, which minimises the amount of data to be passed to the agent as run-time parameters