Occam

Overview

Occam is an Information gathering engine. The user can specify the information she is interesting in as a database query and Occam will try its best to use its knowledge about various information site to derive suitable action sequence to obtain the information.

Occam is different from many other similar projects in many ways. Occam is designed to be small, efficient and distributed, so that eventually it can reside on the web as a java application or a desktop client.

At the core of Occam is a partial order planner. The planner is novel in that it performs heuristic search on database objects. Occam is a joint work with Dan Weld, and recently we co-authored a paper on Occam that was accepted to appear in AAAI96. Occam also has an execution system that performs reasoning about costs of actions for optimal performance, and is built by Marc Friedman.

Here are some of the related systems:

• Information Manifold
• TSMMIS
• SIMS
• The Context Interchange Project

Here are some other softbots we have in UW:

• Rodney
• Simon

Publications

• Planning for Information Gathering (Technical Report)
• Planning to Gather Information (Accepted to AAAI 96)