Bots: Independent Software Agents

A "bot" is a software program which runs on some computer on the web to perform some set of tasks.

Chatbots

Bots whose main interface is a chat channel are called ChatBots -- not all bots are chatbots. Chatbots are understood more by the public sunce that is the form that Large Language Models have been connected to peopl, though chatbots in social media, especially IRC, have been a thing for a long time, typically performing services to the group. A dysfunctional part of the system are bots on social media, such as twitter/X and Facebook which typically pretend to be real people, and spread misinformation and hate. This is (in 2023) a problem which the social media companies should have done many things to fix, but we do not discuss it here in this article about useful bots. @@ pointer to stuff on limits of anonymity.

@@ a it is like a person in some ways:

• It can have an online identity such as a web id
• It can do stuff on the web, interact in the same way as a person
• It can be given access under WAC or ACP to allow specific modes of interest to specific resources.

It is different in other ways

• It has to be set by a person
• It can take on defined tasks specified in RDF using some suitable ontologies