This article review other articles and provide a brief definition on terms that are quite difficult to find, even in Google, such as ‘Artificial Life Geospatial Agents’ (ALGA) representing a computer model that may be independent programming code interacting with other code or a single piece of software itself that use computational models to imitate an individual’s behavioral responses to an external stimuli. It is a crucial tool to model interactions and behaviors between humans, animals and the natural environment.
Unlike ALGA, ‘Software Geospatial Agents’(SGA) is used to manage information and making decisions in hardware and software environment, and it is designed to manage geographically explicit information, such as a geographic coordinate, on behalf of an entity, which can be a person, a software or even hardware.
These agents share couple of common points. For instance, they are both a predominant type of agents in GIScience and they both perceive and respond rationally to new situations to new situations and their environment In addition, they are enable to handle the unique qualities of geospatial data as well.
This article demonstrates further explanations and examples to demonstrate the minimum requirements for a piece of software code to be considered as an “agent” in the AI literature and then, the authors question the existence a Geospatial Agent and underline its importance to both ALGA and SGA. They argue that as much as AI requires spatial information, without it, AI is likely to fail. It sounded quite convincing and all until they mentioned how geographic coordinates as a part of IP specifications could benefit the SGA and Internet community…my skeptical ego just woke up and oh well…Nonetheless of my regard in that specific example, this article in overall did a good job in reviewing other agents-related articles and explaining the roles and definitions of the intelligent agents and of course underlined the uniqueness and importance of geospatial agents that are playing and will be playing in the future by handling geospatial data, which makes it so unique and valuable.
It required me to re-re-re-read this article over and over because the terminology and concept was very unfamiliar and uneasy for me, but it was still quite interesting and always good to learn new terminologies…sometimes… 😛
ESRI
Tags: Agent-Based Model, GIScience