We describe the first steps in the development of an artificial agent focused
on the Brazilian maritime territory, a large region within the South Atlantic
also known as the Blue Amazon. The "BLue Amazon Brain" (BLAB) integrates a
number of services aimed at disseminating information about this region and its
importance, functioning as a tool for environmental awareness. The main service
provided by BLAB is a conversational facility that deals with complex questions
about the Blue Amazon, called BLAB-Chat; its central component is a controller
that manages several task-oriented natural language processing modules (e.g.,
question answering and summarizer systems). These modules have access to an
internal data lake as well as to third-party databases. A news reporter
(BLAB-Reporter) and a purposely-developed wiki (BLAB-Wiki) are also part of the
BLAB service architecture. In this paper, we describe our current version of
BLAB's architecture (interface, backend, web services, NLP modules, and
resources) and comment on the challenges we have faced so far, such as the lack
of training data and the scattered state of domain information. Solving these
issues presents a considerable challenge in the development of artificial
intelligence for technical domains