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
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.
C++ utilities package http://www.boost.org/ | libboost-dev
Build management tool; v2.8 or higher recommended. http://www.cmake.org/ | cmake
Common OpenCog C++ utilities http://github.com/opencog/cogutils It uses exactly the same build procedure as this package. Be sure to
sudo make installat the end.
Test framework http://cxxtest.sourceforge.net/ | https://launchpad.net/~opencog-dev/+archive/ppa
Embedded scheme interpreter (version 2.0.0 or newer is required) http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/guile.html | guile-2.0-dev
The GNU Scientific Library http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/ | libgsl0-dev
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.
Distributed storage http://hypertable.org This requires SIGAR as well
C++ template library for parallel programming https://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/download | libtbb-dev
Generic SQL Database client access libraries Required for the distributed-processing atomspace. http://www.unixodbc.org/ | unixodbc-dev
Asynchronous messaging library http://zeromq.org/intro:get-the-software | libzmq3-dev
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.
To build and run the unit tests, from the ./build directory enter
(after building opencog as above):
make test
After building, you MUST install the atomspace.
sudo make install
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.
Some useful CMake's web sites/pages:
- http://www.cmake.org (main page)
- http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_Useful_Variables
- http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_Useful_Variables/Get_Variables_From_CMake_Dashboards
- http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMakeMacroAddCxxTest
- http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_HowToFindInstalledSoftware
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!)