AtomSpace RESTful Web API
=========================

This module exposes a RESTful web interface to the
[AtomSpace](https://github.com/opencog/atomspace).

The code here is needed by the
[AtomSpace Explorer](https://github.com/opencog/atomspace-explorer).

Warning: This code appears to be obsolete. It uses a number of
deprecated Atomspace API's (the attention bank, for example) and
has dependencies on technologies that are not available on Ubuntu
(for example, "swagger"). At this time, you can install it, but it
will get python errors when you ty to run it.

See http://wiki.opencog.org/w/REST_API for old documentation.

Prerequisites
-------------
To build and run this module, the packages listed below are required.
With a few exceptions, most Linux distributions will provide these
packages. Users of Ubuntu may use the dependency installer from the
`/opencog/octool` repository.  Users of any version of Linux may
use the Dockerfile to quickly build a container in which OpenCog will
be built and run.

###### cogutil
> Common OpenCog C++ utilities
> https://github.com/opencog/cogutil
> It uses exactly the same build procedure as this package. Be sure
  to `sudo make install` at the end.

###### atomspace
> OpenCog Atomspace database and reasoning engine
> https://github.com/opencog/atomspace
> It uses exactly the same build procedure as this package. Be sure
  to `sudo make install` at the end.

###### cogserver
> OpenCog CogServer Network Server.
> https://github.com/opencog/cogserver
> It uses exactly the same build procedure as this package. Be sure
  to `sudo make install` at the end.

###### Flask and Flask RESTful
> Python micro web server
> Try `sudo apt install python3-flask python3-flask-restful python3-flask-cors`

###### CppREST
> C++ HTTP RESTful interfaces
> (Optional) Used by the Pattern miner for distributed processing
  (this will be replaced by gearman in future releases).
> `sudo apt-get install libcpprest-dev`

###### Threading Building Blocks
> C++ template library for parallel programming
> (Optional) Used to implement the optional REST API. (TODO: the
  REST API should be refactored to not use TBB)
> `sudo apt-get install libtbb-dev`

Building
--------
Perform the following steps at the shell prompt:
```
    cd to project root dir
    mkdir build
    cd build
    cmake ..
    make
```
Libraries will be built into subdirectories within build, mirroring
the structure of the source directory root.

Unit tests
----------
To build and run the unit tests, from the `./build` directory enter
(after building opencog as above):
```
    make test
```

Running
-------
To start the system, run one of the servers in the
[examples/restapi](examples/restapi) directory.

TODO
----
The current code assumes an obsolete API to the AtomSpace.  In particular,
it does not support Values in general, and assumes that all atoms have
a TruthValue (they don't, in general) and have an Attention value
(they don't when they are not in the attention bank).  This needs to be
fixed. Volunteers needed.