Transcript Insert title here

Data Exploration
or “What have those agents ever done for us?”
Alasdair Allan
University of Exeter, Exeter, U.K.
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. 2005
VOTech 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. 2005
VOTech 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. 2005
VOTech 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. 2005
VOTech 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. 2005
VOTech 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. 2005
VOTech 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. 2005
VOTech 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
24th Feb. 2005
VOTech Planning Meeting