AtomSpace RESTful Web API

Attention! This code is obsolete!

1. It uses a number of deprecated Atomspace API's (the attention bank, for example)
2. Has dependencies on technologies that are not available on Ubuntu (for example, "swagger").
3. Will not compile on current versions (22.04) of Ubuntu.
4. Older versions (18.04) allow it to compile, but it will generate python errors when you try to run it. Basically, it won't work.
5. The JSON format it generates is an incorrect representation of of AtomSpace contents. It's not how the AtomSpce actually works.

The correct solution is to throw away this code, and port the visualizer to use the supported Atomese interfaces. See the AtomSpace Explorer Issue #8 for details on how to do this.

Overview

This module exposes a RESTful web interface to the AtomSpace.

The code here is needed by the AtomSpace Explorer.

See http://wiki.opencog.org/w/REST_API for old documentation.

Prerequisites

To build and run this module, the packages listed below are required. With a few exceptions, most Linux distributions will provide these packages. Users of Ubuntu may use the dependency installer from the /opencog/octool repository. Users of any version of Linux may use the Dockerfile to quickly build a container in which OpenCog will be built and run.

cogutil

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

atomspace

OpenCog Atomspace database and reasoning engine https://github.com/opencog/atomspace It uses exactly the same build procedure as this package. Be sure to sudo make install at the end.

cogserver

OpenCog CogServer Network Server. https://github.com/opencog/cogserver It uses exactly the same build procedure as this package. Be sure to sudo make install at the end.

Flask and Flask RESTful

Python micro web server Try sudo apt install python3-flask python3-flask-restful python3-flask-cors

CppREST

C++ HTTP RESTful interfaces (Optional) Used by the Pattern miner for distributed processing (this will be replaced by gearman in future releases). sudo apt-get install libcpprest-dev

Threading Building Blocks

C++ template library for parallel programming (Optional) Used to implement the optional REST API. (TODO: the REST API should be refactored to not use TBB) sudo apt-get install libtbb-dev

Building

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

Running

To start the system, run one of the servers in the examples/restapi directory.

TODO

The current code assumes an obsolete API to the AtomSpace. In particular, it does not support Values in general, and assumes that all atoms have a TruthValue (they don't, in general) and have an Attention value (they don't when they are not in the attention bank). This needs to be fixed. Volunteers needed.