Release notes for Nuin 0.3 - Nov 2004

This release of Nuin features two main innovations: a re-written RDF interface and the skeleton of support for interacting with web services.

• The RDF support in Nuin 0.2 was not very effective. Starting with Nuin 0.3, RDF values in a Jena model are exposed as Nuin KsValue and KsSentence objects by providing implementations of the appropriate interfaces that directly access state information from the RDF graph. Thus there is less duplication of state and scope for transcription errors. This release focusses mainly on pure RDF support; extensions to OWL reasoning will be further explored in future. RDF support is now refactored into a separate Java package: org.nuin.ks.store.rdf.
• In Nuin 0.2, the service abstraction described in the architecture was used only to interact with agent services provisioned within the agent as Java classes. This abstraction was intended simply to provide a flexible means of extending agents with plug-ins. Starting with Nuin 0.3, we are moving to support web-services interaction directly from the agent platform, both as a means of provisioning additional capabilities to the agent, but also to provide an alternative to the FIPA stack for the agent society infrastructure. This is still a work-in-progress; the 0.3 release provides support for dynamically binding services to the agent platform using a WSDL service description, and the extension to the @ perform verb to allow it to invoke web services directly from the agent script.