FOUNDATION FOR INTELLIGENT PHYSICAL AGENTS
<<TC or WG Name>> Call For Technology
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Document title |
<<TC or WG Name>> Call For Technology |
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Document number |
<<Document Number>> |
Document source |
<<TC or WG Name>> |
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Document status |
Preliminary |
Date of this status |
<<Date>> |
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Submissions due by |
<<Submission deadline>> |
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Contact |
<<Mailing list email address>> |
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Change history |
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<<Date>> |
Initial draft |
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© 2000 Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents - http://www.fipa.org/
Geneva, Switzerland
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Notice |
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Use of the technologies described in FIPA's specifications may infringe patents, copyrights or other intellectual property rights of FIPA Members and non-members. Nothing in this document should be construed as granting permission to use any of the technologies described. Anyone planning to make use of technology covered by the intellectual property rights of others should first obtain permission from the holder(s) of the rights. FIPA strongly encourages anyone implementing any part of FIPA's specification to determine first whether part(s) sought to be implemented are covered by the intellectual property of others, and, if so, to obtain appropriate licenses or other permission from the holder(s) of such intellectual property prior to implementation. This document is subject to change without notice. Neither FIPA nor any of its Members accept any responsibility whatsoever for damages or liability, direct or consequential, which may result from the use of FIPA's specifications. |
Foreword
The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) is an international organization that is dedicated to promoting the industry of intelligent agents by openly developing specifications supporting interoperability among agents and agent-based applications. This occurs through open collaboration among its member organizations, which are companies and universities that are active in the field of agents. FIPA makes the results of its activities available to all interested parties and intends to contribute its results to the appropriate formal standards bodies.
The members of FIPA are individually and collectively committed to open competition in the development of agent-based applications, services and equipment. Membership in FIPA is open to any corporation and individual firm, partnership, governmental body or international organization without restriction. In particular, members are not bound to implement or use specific agent-based standards, recommendations and FIPA specifications by virtue of their participation in FIPA.
The FIPA specifications are developed through direct involvement of the FIPA membership. The status of a specification can be either Preliminary, Experimental, Standard, Deprecated or Obsolete.More detail about the process of specification may be found in the FIPA Procedures for Technical Work. A complete overview of the FIPA specifications and their current status may be found in the FIPA List of Specifications. A list of terms and abbreviations used in the FIPA specifications may be found in the FIPA Glossary.
FIPA is a non-profit association registered in Geneva, Switzerland. As of January 2000, the 56 members of FIPA represented 17countries worldwide. Further information about FIPA as an organization, membership information, FIPA specifications and upcoming meetings may be found at http://www.fipa.org/.
Contents
1 Glossary......................................................................................................................................................... 1
1.1 Abbreviations............................................................................................................................................ 1
1.2 Definitions................................................................................................................................................ 1
2 Objectives....................................................................................................................................................... 5
3 Introduction..................................................................................................................................................... 6
4 Instructions for Submitters................................................................................................................................ 7
4.1 Responding to this CFT............................................................................................................................. 7
4.1.1 Timescales........................................................................................................................................ 7
4.1.2 Notification of Intent............................................................................................................................ 7
4.1.3 Separate Technology Proposals........................................................................................................... 7
4.1.4 Completeness of Technology Proposals............................................................................................... 7
4.2 Confidential and Proprietary Information...................................................................................................... 7
4.3 Format of CFT Submissions....................................................................................................................... 7
4.3.1 General.............................................................................................................................................. 7
4.3.2 Suggested Outline.............................................................................................................................. 7
4.4 How to Submit.......................................................................................................................................... 8
4.5 Response to Submissions.......................................................................................................................... 8
5 General Requirements for Submissions............................................................................................................. 9
6 Specific Requirements for Proposals............................................................................................................... 10
6.1 Problem Statement.................................................................................................................................. 10
6.2 Relationship to Existing FIPA Specifications.............................................................................................. 11
6.3 Related Non-FIPA Documents.................................................................................................................. 11
6.4 Mandatory Requirements.......................................................................................................................... 11
6.5 Optional Requirements............................................................................................................................. 11
6.6 Issues to be Discussed............................................................................................................................ 11
6.7 Other Information..................................................................................................................................... 11
6.8 Timetable................................................................................................................................................ 11
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Abbreviation |
Expansion |
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ACC |
Agent Communication Channel |
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ACL |
Agent Communication Language |
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AMS |
Agent Management System |
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AP |
Agent Platform |
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CCL |
Common Command Language |
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CFT |
CFT |
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CL |
Content Language |
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DF |
Directory Facilitator |
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FAB |
FIPA Architecture Board |
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FIPA |
Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents |
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GPRS |
General Packet Radio Service |
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GSM |
Global System for Mobile communications |
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GUID |
Globally Unique Agent Name |
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HTTP |
HyperText Transfer Protocol |
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IIOP |
Internet Inter-Orb Protocol |
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KIF |
Knowledge Interchange Format |
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LAN |
Local Area Network |
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MTM |
Message Transport Model |
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MTP |
Message Transport Protocol |
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MTS |
Message Transport Service |
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PDA |
Personal Digital Assistant |
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RDF |
Resource Description Framework |
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(FIPA) TC |
(FIPA) Technical Committee |
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TCP/IP |
Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol |
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UMTS |
Universal Mobile Telecommunications System |
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WAN |
Wide Area Network |
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WAP |
Wireless Application Protocol |
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(FIPA) WG |
(FIPA) Working Group |
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WLAN |
Wireless Local Area Network |
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WWAN |
Wireless Wide Area Network |
Action
A basic construct which represents some activity which an agent may perform. A special class of actions is the communicative acts.
Agent
An agent is the fundamental actor in a domain. It combines one or more service capabilities into a unified and integrated execution model which can include access to external software, human users and communication facilities.
Agent Communication Language
A language with precisely defined syntax, semantics and pragmatics that is the basis of communication between independently designed and developed software agents.
Agent Communication Channel
A part of the Agent Platform which uses information provided by the Agent Management System to route messages between agents within the Agent Platform and to agents that reside on other Agent Platforms.
Agent Management System
A part of the Agent Platform which manages the creation, deletion, suspension, resumption, authentication and migration of agents on the Agent Platform and provides a white pages directory service for all agents resident on an Agent Platform.
Agent Platform
Provides an infrastructure in which agents can be deployed. An agent must be registered on a platform in order to interact with other agents on that Agent Platform or indeed other Agent Platforms. An Agent Platform consists of three capability sets: An Agent Communication Channel, an Agent Management System and at least one Directory Facilitator.
Communicative Act
A special class of actions that correspond to the basic building blocks of dialogue between agents. A communicative act has a well-defined, declarative meaning independent of the content of any given act. Communicate acts are modelled on speech act theory.
Content
That part of a communicative act which represents the domain dependent component of the communication. Note that "the content of a message" does not refer to "everything within the message, including the delimiters", as it does in some languages, but rather specifically to the domain specific component. In the Agent Communication Language semantic model, a content expression may be composed from propositions, actions or Identifying Referring Expressions.
Content Language
The content of a FIPA message refers to whatever the communicative act applies. If, in general terms, the communicative act is considered as a sentence, then the content is the grammatical object of the sentence. This content can be encoded in any language, called the content language.
Conversation
An ongoing sequence of communicative acts exchanged between two (or more) agents relating to some ongoing topic of discourse. A conversation may (perhaps implicitly) accumulate context that is used to determine the meaning of later messages in the conversation.
Directory Facilitator
A part of the Agent Platform that provides a yellow pages directory service for the agents. It stores descriptions of the agents and the services they offer.
Gateway
A gateway is a component residing between agent platforms. A gateway may relay messages between incompatible transports, may translate messages from one encoding to another, and may provide quality-of-service features supported by one party but not another.
Interaction Protocol
A common pattern of conversations used to perform some generally useful task. An interaction protocol is often used to facilitate a simplification of the computational machinery needed to support a given dialogue task between two agents.
Nomadic Application
A distributed application, with services that people can easily access while they are on the move, both at intermediate stops, and at arbitrary destinations. Typically people use mobile computers, PDAs, and intelligent phones along with different kinds of wireless communication networks, such as GSM, GPRS, and UMTS to access the services of nomadic applications.
Message
An individual unit of communication between two or more agents. A message corresponds to a communicative act, in the sense that a message encodes the communicative act for reliable transmission between agents. Note that communicative acts can be recursively composed, so while the outermost act is directly encoded by the message, taken as a whole a given message may represent multiple individual communicative acts.
Message Content
See Content.
Message Transport Connection
A physical instance of a peer-to-peer data communication connection between Agent Communication Channels and agents, over which a Message Transport Protocol can be run.
Message Transport Protocol
An instance of a network transport protocol that is used to carry out the physical transfer of messages between two Agent Communication Channels, between an agent and a remote or local Agent Communication Channel, or between two agents.
Message Transport Service
A service provided by the Agent Platform to which the agent is attached. The Message Transport Service supports the transportation of Agent Communication Language messages between agents. On any given Agent Platform, the Message Transport Service is provided by the Agent Communication Channel.
Ontology
An explicit specification of the structure of a certain domain (for example, e-commerce, sport, etc.). For the practical goals of FIPA (that is enabling development and deployment of inter-operable agent-based applications), this includes a vocabulary (that is, a list of logical constants and predicate symbols) for referring to the subject area and a set of logical statements expressing the constraints existing in the domain and restricting the interpretation of the vocabulary. Ontologies therefore provide a vocabulary for representing and communicating knowledge about some topic and a set of relationships and properties that hold for the entities denoted by that vocabulary.
Ontology Name
The ontologies referred to by agents that can be provided by different ontology servers. Consequently, these ontology names are constructed from the ontology agent name and the ontology logical name (given by the ontology designer, for example, "car").
Roaming
An action where a mobile terminal moves from one network coverage area to another. This action may take place, for example, when the mobile terminal moves from a GSM network operated by one operator to a GSM network operated by a different operator, or when the mobile terminal moves from a GPRS network to a wireless local area network.
WAP
The Wireless Application Protocol is wireless application architecture developed by an industrial consortium called the WAP Forum. The architecture is based on client – proxy – server model, and it addresses the problems created by accessing Internet services via low bandwidth wireless protocols and low-end mobile devices.
Wireless Environment
An agent communication environment, where at least one component of the communication media is implemented with radio signals.
Wireline Environment
An agent communication environment, where all components of the communication media are implemented with wired connections.
Wireless Local Area Network
The transmission media of a Wireless Local Area Network is a radio signal (typically in the frequency bands 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz) with very limited coverage area, such as a department or a campus. Typical features of WLAN are the following: line rate is between 2 Mbits/s and 10 Mbits/s and roundtrip time is about 3 ms. An example of WLAN is an IEEE 802.11 based network.
Wireless Wide Area Network
The transmission media of a Wireless Wide Area Network is a radio signal (typically in the frequency bands 450 MHz, 900 MHz and 1.8 GHz) with large coverage area, such as a city or a country. Typical features of WWAN are the following: line rate is below 64 Kbits/s and roundtrip time is about 400 – 500 ms. Examples of WWAN are GPRS, CDPD, and CDMA.
<<Insert the objectives of the CfP here.>>
<<Remember to edit the properties of this document under File -> Properties.>>
<<Describe the CfP, including background, problem statement, requirements, etc.>>
See Table 3 in Section 6.8, Timetable for submission deadlines.
Individuals or companies must notify the FIPA secretariat (secretariat@fipa.org) of their intention to respond to this CFT (see Table 3).
A submitter may respond to any or all parts of this CFT. Each technology will be evaluated independently by <<TC or WG name>>. It should be noted that a given technology (theoretical or tested and proven work) may support two or more parts of the CFT.
Proposals for each separate technology item need not be complete. However, reasons for not being complete must be clearly stated.
The FIPA specification adoption process is an open process. Responses to this CFT become public documents of the FIPA and are available to members and non-members alike for perusal. No confidentiality or proprietary information of any kind will be accepted in a submission to this CFT.
This section provides guidance on how to structure a submission.
· Submissions must be written in English.
· Submissions should be concise and easy to read.
· Submitted documentation should be directly relevant to the technology requested in the CFT.
· The file format of the submissions should be one of plain text, HTML, PDF, Microsoft Word or PostScript.
A two-part structure for a submission is suggested:
PART I
· Submission contact point, including name, postal address, affiliation, email address, telephone number, fax number.
· Completeness of the submission (see Section 4.1.4, Completeness of Technology Proposals).
· Overview of the submission.
PART II
· Proposed specification(s).
Submitters should send an electronic version of their submission to the FIPA Secretariat (secretariat@fipa.org) and a copy to the <<TC or WG name>> mailing list (<<TC or WG mailing list email address>>).
Feedback on submissions will be provided in accordance with the timescales shown in Table 3. The response will be send to the email and postal address provided by the submitter.
Proposals should not conflict with the FIPA specifications given in Table 2.
Note the following when writing a proposal:
· Any conflicts must be clearly identified, along with reasons for them.
· Emphasis should be put on the use of reusable components.
· Proposals shall preserve maximum implementation flexibility and interoperability.
· The use of UML modelling is desirable, but not mandatory.
· Proposals can be based on theoretical work or tested, proven work.
· <<Insert additional general requirements here.>>
<<Describe any specific requirements of the CfP.>>
<<Describe the problem to be addressed.>>
Table 1 and Table 2 identify existing FIPA Specifications which have a relationship to technologies requested in this CFT. All the specifications can be retrieved from http://www.fipa.org/specs/.
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Specification Number |
Title |
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FIPAxxxxx |
<<List the referenced specification title>> |
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FIPAxxxxx |
<<List the referenced specification title>> |
Table 1: Referenced Relevant FIPA Specifications
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Specification Number |
Title |
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FIPAxxxxx |
<<List the non-referenced specification title>> |
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FIPAxxxxx |
<<List the -nonreferenced specification title>> |
Table 2: Non-Referenced Relevant FIPA Specifications
<<List related non-FIPA documents or replace with 'None.'>>
<<Describe any mandatory requirements associated with this CfP or replace with 'None.'>>
<<Describe any optional requirements associated with this CfP or replace with 'None.'>>
<<Describe any specific discussion points associated with this CfP or replace with 'None.'>>
<<List any other information relevant to this CfP or replace with 'None.'.>>
The timetable for this CFT is given in Table 3. Note that FIPA may, in certain circumstances, extend deadlines while the CFT is running, or may elect to have more than one revised submission step.
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Action |
Latest Date |
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<<List action>> |
<<List date by which action should be complete>> |
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<<List action>> |
<<List date by which action should be complete>> |
Table 3: Timescales