SodaBot: A Software Agent Environment and Construction System

This thesis presents SodaBot, a general-purpose software agent user-environment and construction system. Its primary component is the basic software agent --- a computational framework for building agents which is essentially an agent operating system. We also present a new language for programming the basic software agent whose primitives are designed around human-level descriptions of agent activity. Via this programming language, users can easily implement a wide-range of typical software agent applications, e.g. personal on-line assistants and meeting scheduling agents. The SodaBot system has been implemented and tested, and its description comprises the bulk of this thesis.