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Distiller — academic tutorial

Released in FCC v1.2.1. You are teaching or studying agent-team architectures and want to use Distiller as a case study for distributed event processing, semantic translation, FAIR compliance, or real-time visualization. This tutorial connects the subsystem to the underlying research literature and shows how to cite it properly in classwork or publications.

What this subsystem does

The Distiller subsystem provides the Distiller Bridge adapter for Fornax NanoCube integration, providing hierarchical data queries, synthetic data fabrication, and exchange contracts (mock mode by default).

The implementation lives at src/fcc/protocols/distiller_bridge.py. It ships with FCC core (no separate install needed) and is exercised by:

Focus persona: EBO — Event Bridge Orchestrator

We anchor this academic-track tutorial on EBO because that's the persona most relevant to a academic use of the Distiller subsystem.

from fcc._resources import get_personas_dir
from fcc.personas.registry import PersonaRegistry

registry = PersonaRegistry.from_yaml_directory(get_personas_dir())
persona = registry.get("EBO")
print(persona.name)
print(persona.role_title)
print(persona.riscear.role)

Citing this subsystem in academic work

When discussing the distiller subsystem in classwork or publications, cite both:

  1. The FCC framework citation (see docs/community/citation.md)
  2. The relevant standards: WebSocket RFC 6455 for web-frontend, the Fornax NanoCube paper for distiller, the GO FAIR principles for open-science, and the D3.js paper for skyparlour

Reproducibility considerations

The distiller subsystem in mock mode is fully deterministic — the same input produces the same output across runs. This makes it suitable for academic experiments where reproducibility matters.

A homework prompt

Using the EBO persona and the distiller subsystem, design an experiment that produces a quantitative measurement of [your research question]. Document your inputs, outputs, and reproducibility procedure following the Open Science FAIR template.

What you learned

  • The subsystem can be cited via the framework citation + standards
  • Mock mode is reproducible, making it suitable for controlled experiments
  • The persona dimensions provide a structured way to characterize the actor in your study

Verification

Run the focused test suite for this subsystem:

pytest tests/test_distiller_bridge.py -v

All tests should pass on a clean v1.2.1 install. If they don't, check that you have the optional deps from the [full] extras group:

pip install -e ".[full]"

Next steps