Agent Communication Language (ACL), proposed by the

Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) is a body for developing and setting computer software standards for heterogeneous and interacting agents and agent-based systems. FIPA was founded as a Swiss not-for-profit organization i ...

(FIPA), is a proposed standard language for

agent Agent may refer to: Espionage, investigation, and law *, spies or intelligence officers * Law of agency, laws involving a person authorized to act on behalf of another ** Agent of record, a person with a contractual agreement with an insuranc ...

communications.

Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language The Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language, or KQML, is a language and protocol for communication among software agents and knowledge-based systems. It was developed in the early 1990s as part of the DARPA knowledge Sharing Effort, which was aim ...

(KQML) is another proposed standard. The most popular ACLs are: * FIPA-ACL (by the

, a standardization consortium) * KQML (Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language) Both rely on speech act theory developed by

Searle Searle may refer to: __NOTOC__ Persons * Searle (surname) * J. Searle Dawley (1877–1949), American film director, producer, screenwriter, stage actor and playwright * Searle Turton (born 1979), Canadian politician Places * Serle, a comune in Lomb ...

in the 1960s and enhanced by Winograd and Flores in the 1970s. They define a set of performatives, also called Communicative Acts, and their meaning (e.g. ask-one). The content of the performative is not standardized, but varies from system to system. To make agents understand each other they have to not only speak the same language, but also have a common

ontology In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exi ...

. An ontology is a part of the agent's knowledge base that describes what kind of things an agent can deal with and how they are related to each other. Examples of frameworks that implement a standard agent communication language (FIPA-ACL) include FIPA-OS and Jade.

References

Formal languages Knowledge representation Multi-agent systems {{computing-stub