Data Exploration or “What have those agents ever done for us?” Alasdair Allan University of Exeter, Exeter, U.K.

24th Feb. 2005VOTech Planning Meeting 1 Agent architectures? An agent is “just software” not magic Most successful agent architectures are based on partial plan approaches Most multi-agent systems are based on the collaborative agents paradigm

24th Feb. 2005VOTech Planning Meeting 2 Multi-agent systems A multi-agent system is one that consists of a number of agents, which interact with one-another In the most general case, agents will be acting on behalf of users with different goals and motivations To successfully interact, they will require the ability to cooperate, coordinate, and negotiate with each other, much the same as “real” people

24th Feb. 2005VOTech Planning Meeting 3 Multi-agent systems are about … Decision making Asking questions Brokering agreements –Carrying out resource discovery could mean that your agent looks to your collaborators agent for data and expertise before it looks to “central” sources.

24th Feb. 2005VOTech Planning Meeting 4 Data mining Collaborative agents operate in a flat world, they can access proprietary data from a collaborator just as easily as public data from a “central” source Agents can encapsulate knowledge, and retrieve data that will be “good enough” to get the job done…

24th Feb. 2005VOTech Planning Meeting 5 Data mining Encapsulating knowledge in the VO means that we can generate high level science products High level products can be used as the basis for decision making Every decision made means that the learning curve for the user is that much shallower

24th Feb. 2005VOTech Planning Meeting 6 Data exploration Astronomers will want to combine their own data with data from the VO Proprietary data, both their own, and data belonging to collaborators New data and event notification in real time directly from the observatories

24th Feb. 2005VOTech Planning Meeting 7 What they have done for us … Agent architectures proved to be a big win for robotic telescopes networks Using agent architectures increased our flexibility, scalability and autonomy Real time systems needed robustness, agent architectures provided it

24th Feb. 2005VOTech Planning Meeting 8 Suggestions? I think we should investigate science and infrastructure use cases for agents Build prototypes for resource discovery and data exploration to see if they can provide a similar win for the VO