OpenCog AtomSpace

The OpenCog Atomspace is the hypergraph database and query/reasoning engine used by OpenCog to hold data and perform reasoning on it.

The main project site is at http://opencog.org

An interactive tutorial for getting started is available at: https://github.com/opencog/opencog/blob/master/TUTORIAL.md

Prerequisites

To build the OpenCog AtomSpace, the packages listed below are required. With a few exceptions, most Linux distributions will provide these packages. Users of Ubuntu 14.04 "Trusty Tahr" may use the dependency installer at /scripts/octool. Users of any version of Linux may use the Dockerfile to quickly build a container in which OpenCog will be built and run.

boost

C++ utilities package http://www.boost.org/ | libboost-dev

cmake

Build management tool; v2.8 or higher recommended. http://www.cmake.org/ | cmake

cogutil

Common OpenCog C++ utilities http://github.com/opencog/cogutils It uses exactly the same build procedure as this package. Be sure to sudo make install at the end.

cxxtest

Test framework http://cxxtest.sourceforge.net/ | https://launchpad.net/~opencog-dev/+archive/ppa Currently, opencog requires cxxtest version 3, and is not compatible with version 4.

guile

Embedded scheme interpreter (version 2.0.0 or newer is required) http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/guile.html | guile-2.0-dev

libgsl

The GNU Scientific Library http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/ | libgsl0-dev

Optional Prerequisites

The following packages are optional. If they are not installed, some optional parts of OpenCog will not be built. The CMake command, during the build, will be more precise as to which parts will not be built.

HyperTable

Distributed storage http://hypertable.org This requires SIGAR as well

Threading Building Blocks

C++ template library for parallel programming https://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/download | libtbb-dev

unixODBC

Generic SQL Database client access libraries Required for the distributed-processing atomspace. http://www.unixodbc.org/ | unixodbc-dev

ZeroMQ (version 3.2.4 or higher)

Asynchronous messaging library http://zeromq.org/intro:get-the-software | libzmq3-dev

Building AtomSpace

Perform the following steps at the shell prompt:

    cd to project root dir
    mkdir build
    cd build
    cmake ..
    make

Libraries will be built into subdirectories within build, mirroring the structure of the source directory root.

Unit tests

To build and run the unit tests, from the ./build directory enter (after building opencog as above):

    make test

Install

After building, you MUST install the atomspace.

    sudo make install

Using the AtomSpace

The AtomSpace can be used in one of three ways, or a mixture of all three: By using the GNU Guile scheme interface, by using Python, or by running the OpenCog cogserver.

Guile provides the easiest interface for creating atoms, loading them into the AtomSpace, and performing various processing operations on them. For examples, see the /examples/guile and the /examples/pattern-matcher directories.

Python is more familiar than scheme (guile) to most programmers, and it offers another way of intrfacing to the atomspace. See the /examples/python directory for how to use python with the AtomSpace.

The OpenCog cogserver provides a network server interface to OpenCog. It is required for running embodiment, some of the reasoning agents, and some of the natural-language processing agents. The cogserver is only available in the main OpenCog project; it is not a part of the AtomSpace.

CMake notes

Some useful CMake's web sites/pages:

The main CMakeLists.txt currently sets -DNDEBUG. This disables Boost matrix/vector debugging code and safety checks, with the benefit of making it much faster. Boost sparse matrixes and (dense) vectors are currently used by ECAN's ImportanceDiffusionAgent. If you use Boost ublas in other code, it may be a good idea to at least temporarily unset NDEBUG. Also if the Boost assert.h is used it will be necessary to unset NDEBUG. Boost ublas is intended to respond to a specific BOOST_UBLAS_NDEBUG, however this is not available as of the current Ubuntu standard version (1.34).

-Wno-deprecated is currently enabled by default to avoid a number of warnings regarding hash_map being deprecated (because the alternative is still experimental!)

tfitzhardinge/atomspace