I have to say, this Robot really impressed me. Not so much by what it does, but the promise of what these types of robots could do.

Igor as explained on the Igor Google Source Code page is:

A proof of concept Google Wave robot that helps people manage the process of adding references to an academic article.

The minimum you’ll need to do to get started is to edit the appengine-web.xml file and put your own app engine application name inside the “application” element.

Note that I’m not normally a Java developer and this really is just a proof of concept. The code lacks tests and is poorly organized.

OTOH sometimes things that seem messy and complicated are that way for a reason. Usually the reason is that Google Wave is still a developer preview and bits of the Java API don’t work yet or need changing (notably getting the IDs of newly created blips and communicating with gadgets).

The debugging log is turned on in the code. I recommend that you look at what’s actually being passed between the Wave server and App Engine in the wire protocol JSON – right now it’s the best way to work out what is and isn’t supported by the Wave API! If it isn’t in the JSON you can’t access it in the robot.

Functions that use regular expressions to modify the text are the most obviously overly complicated pieces of code – patterns have to be matched one at a time because otherwise the String that you’re finding matches on and the internal representation of the contents of the Wave (the TextView) get out of sync.

Below a video of Igor in action (very impressive):

Igor is currently configured to grab references from PubMed, Connotea and CiteUlike. Click on there links to learn more about them.

What is great about this Robot is the way it really does highlight the power that Google Wave Robots could harness. Putting together any kind of technical or research paper just got so much easier.

Imagine being linked to a chemistry reference robot that gives you C2H6O when you type in the word ethanol. Or a quotation robot that gives you “To be or note to be” when you type in “quote hamlet suicide”, etc, etc. The list goes on and on. Basically Google Wave robots could give you very exact information to choose from based on very vague information. Thus, not only free up more time via collaboration but it also shows promise in its ability to drastically cut down on research time.

I’m sure that you can think of many other applications for these types of robots, please share below in comments.

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