 - A bot (short for "robot") is a program that operates as an agent for a user or another program or simulates a human activity. On the Internet, the most ubiquitous bots are the programs, also called spiders or crawlers, that access Web sites and gather their content for search engine indexes.
A chatterbot is a program that can simulate talk with a human being. One of the first and most famous chatterbots (prior to the Web) was Eliza, a program that pretended to be a psychotherapist and answered questions with other questions.
Red and Andrette were names of two early programs that could be customized to answer questions from users seeking service for a product. Such a program is sometimes called a virtual representative or a virtual service agent.
A shopbot is a program that shops around the Web on your behalf and locates the best price for a product you're looking for. There are also bots such as OpenSesame that observe a user's patterns in navigating a Web site and customize the site for that user.
A knowbot is a program that collects knowledge for a user by automatically visiting Internet sites and gathering information that meets certain specified criteria.
 |
Learn more about Cloud/Grid computing and virtualization for SOA |
| Seeing cloud computing clearly: There is a lot of positive praise for cloud computing. Are there any negative side effects that businesses should be aware of? |
| Grid applications merge with SOA infrastructures: Our company's SOA efforts and grid efforts have taken place completely separate from one another, now we're looking to bring them together. From a technical standpoint, where are the best places to ... |
| Get into the grid: Grid computing ties distributed computing resources via a local or wide area network making them appear as one large virtual computing system to an end user or application. |
| Grid Computing: Whatis.com says according to IBM's John Patrick, "the next big thing will be grid computing." |
| Are grids the future of Web services?: IBM, HP, Sun and other industry giants think grid and utility computing are the future of distributed computing. Find out how Web services figure into their pay-as-you-go plans. |
| Protocols for cloud services - Part 2: This article takes a look at JavaSpace and Hadoop, two different technologies that distribute computing jobs to cloud computing resources, manage it, and get results back. |
| Review of protocols for cloud services - Part 1: A discussion of the wide range of protocols and architecture in grid/cloud/distributed computing is in order. Bill Brogden discusses some of them in order of increasing complexity. |
| LAST UPDATED: |
05 Jan 2002
|
 |
Do you have something to add to this definition? Let us know.
Send your comments to techterms@whatis.com
|
|
More resources from around the web:
|
|
Show me everything on 
