I wrote... more truthfully I should say, I am writing this bootstrap guide for people like me, coming to the Atomspace cold, without the context and background to make sense of the documentation that is available elsewhere on the OpenCog wiki and GitHub repositories. My intention is to clear up some of the the questions and misunderstandings that gave me trouble at first, and map out a path for getting up to speed reasonably quickly.
Often throughout the guide I'll make authoritative sounding statements, e.g. "It is...". This is a stylistic choice because the alternative "It appears to me that..." would make the guide even more tedious to read. I am FAR from an OpenCog or Atomspace expert, and any improvements or corrections to the guide are most welcome.
The Atomspace examples on Github are already designed to be an introduction. They can be found here: https://github.com/opencog/atomspace/tree/master/examples/atomspace
Personally, I felt like the examples alone were not able to answer many of my questions, either because they assumed some prior knowledge or vocabulary I didn't have or because the ordering of topics didn't fit with the way I was able to grok the information. Therefore, I am attempting to fill in the gaps where I personally got hung up.
This guide is intended to be fairly lowest-common-denominator, and therefore may feel painfully slow in places, especially for people who already have some familiarity with this subject. If that's you, feel free to skip ahead. Just know that I try to thoroughly explain everything in order, so no mysterious new concepts should appear out of nowhere without introduction.
This guide duplicates many of the ideas that are also covered in the examples, because I also wanted the guide to be able to stand alone. That said, I tried to focus the guide on the places where I felt the examples missed something important, or waited too long to introduce a critical concept.
Perhaps you will find this guide to be complimentary to the examples, and progressing through both in parallel might be the best approach.
Let's begin.
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 3 :caption: Contents: contents/01_getting_oriented contents/02_representing_knowledge contents/03_atomese_programming contents/04_evaluation_and_truth_values contents/05_logical_inferencing