I’m stepping lightly into the autonomous agent space and it feels kinda good. Why not join me?

Outside

I’ve spent the better part of the last 30 years doing something w/ computers. From home hobbyist fiddling to international nattering about threats, trends, and futures. And, I’ve ben able to make a decent living at it, too. I’m a very lucky man.

One of the threads I’ve been pulling on for quite some time is the notion of autonomous agents – self-driven virtual bots – and how they might act, and interact, on the Web. I’ve been pulling this thread as an outsider. I don’t have degress in computing, social sciences, philosophy, or psychology – just some of the points of view that add clarity to the world of virtual agents.

Instead, my background is firmly planted in the “business computing” world; all built on top of a strong foundation of an advanced university degree in music theory and composition. LOL!

Looking In

A little over ten years ago, I published one of my agent experiments – the Maze+XML media type, along with a working server and a couple client apps. I continued to play around with that design (and a few others). That project, and a related one I used to describe virtual environments (ALPS) was even featured in a book I wrote with Leonard Richardson (RESTful Web APIs).

I’ve always enjoyed working on these kinds of projects and continue to do so. But in 2018 things took an unexpected turn.

We’re Not In Kansas

I also make occasional excursions into the academic world by attending and sometimes contributing to events like WS-REST, SALAD-2013 at EWSC, HyperAgents2019 at The Web Conf, and – most recently – Autonomous Agents on the Web (2021) at Schloss Dagstuhl.

It was at this last event where, I unvieled an updated version of the virtual maze agent and it was well-received and a topic of continued conversation. That experience encouraged me to gather much of the content I’ve generated on this topic into a series of demos and slide sets. And that’s what you see published here.

Srsly?

For those well-versed in the autonomy space as well as deeply entrenched in the Semantic Web and related tech, I suspect my efforts here seem naive – that’s fine. I’m doing this at my own pace in my own way and doing my best to learn as much as I can in the process. It’s fine w/ me if you pass this material over and move on - no worries.

However, you may find some of this interesting, possibly encouraging, and maybe even inspiring enough to get you to create some working examples of autonomous agents in the Web. And that would be great.

– @mamund