Akibot Use Case description

Use case

(Taken from esme-dev mailing list: still needs to be confirmed)

1.  One of the Purchasing employees posted this in the Purchasing micro-blog group: "@victoria I just ordered 3,000 more G70" (G70 is an item "Kidco fireplace gate"). to let his boss know that he ordered what they discussed some days ago.
2.  Akibot picked up the conversation and understood that 3,000 G70 were ordered (through the contextual analyzer
3. Akibot inquired the purchasing history for G70 (through an ERP feed) and noticed that this was an unusual quantity (through the directive processor)
4. Akibot then called up another application that inquiries the price for G70 in Amazon and other online retailers (through the directive processor as well)
5. Akibot found that Toys'r'us is selling G70 cheaper (through the directive processor as well)
6. Since Purchasing just ordered more G70, and competitors are selling it cheaper, there will be a problem!
7. Akibot posts back a message alerting the Sales group:  "Purchasing just ordered 3,000 more G70. We're selling it at $194.99, the competition at $184.99 (Toysrus)"
8. Sales will contact Purchasing, and either they lower the price or cancel the purchase order

This "reasoning" that Akibot has, is through directives. This use case above is one directive. Akibot comes with standard directives and you can add custom directives ("teach" him). These directives can be shared by other companies using Akibot, so the more companies use Akibot, the more Akibot learns...

Technical Description

1. Messages are post in ESME
2. ESME sends message to Akibot via HTTP POST
3. Akibot acknowledges the message reception by responding the HTTP POST call with an XML response
4. Akibot store the message and processes it through its Contextual Analyzer (C>A) module
5. If necessary, Akibot makes inquiries the corresponding enterprise (ERP or Groupware) application via HTTP REQUEST
6. The enterprise application processes the inquiry
7. The enterprise application responds to the inquiry with an XML response
8. Akibot processes the enterprise application response with its Directive Processor (DP), which decides if any action is to be taken
9. If Akibot decides that an action needs to be taken (for now, just sending back a message to the microblog) it does so by sending the message via HTTP POST call to ESME
10. (Optional) ESME can send back an acknowledge to Akibot letting it know that the message was successfully received

Integration analysis: ESME Action

Use ESME's existing action architecture to post to akibot via its HTTP POST interface.

We can post to twitter via this mechanism so should also be able to post to you guys as well.

For example,

http://user:password@identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml
status=%s

The Akibot REST API to send messages has the following parameters:

We just have to map our parameters to these values.

Iterations

1. Use existing akibot infrastructure and attempt to use ESME's action mechanism to post to akibot's REST API
2. Start changing akibot infrastructure (contextual analyzer, etc) to be more ESME-specific

Questions

1. What sort of back-end system are we talking about? Are you already using a system that we can re-use for initial tests?
2. We also have to agree on what sort of message contents (formats, etc.) will be used Are there special words (invoice, etc.) that are necessary. This is, of course, linked to what sort of back-end you guys are using.
3. What sort of rules are present in the DP? The obvious one would be to create an ESME message.
4. Regarding 10, we do respond with a XML response to those submitting messages via REST API
5. Do you want to use the old REST API or the new "Streaming API" (Ethan's baby :->)?
6. We just probably use a POST action as Ethan suggests as a first step
7. You are right about the messaging threads needing standardization (especially 2 and 9). Maybe you can look at my table in the wiki page and tell me about what the parameters mean and whether they are optional or not. We will have to map them to our fields.
8. We also have to think about user-ids. Do they need to be synchronized? Probably....