Agent By Example - A Novel Approach to Implement Reactive Agents in Active Databases

There is a connection between reactive agents and active databases that has been explored in previous papers; in brief we know that both fields rely on reactivity and that reactive agents can be implemented in active databases. When discussing active databases, triggers are unavoidable. Although one of the ways to implement triggers is to use Structured Query Language (CREATE TRIGGER statement in SQL), another (more interesting) one is based on the idea of Trigger By Example (TBE) approach. TBE is based on Query By Example (QBE) which is another recognized language used to work with databases (QBE is a graphically oriented language and therefore a little bit easier to learn and use than SQL). In this paper a new approach to implement reactive agents in active databases is presented, the so-called Agent By Example (ABE) approach. This idea is based on the already mentioned Query By Example and Trigger By Example approaches that are extended and modified as is presented and described in the paper.