FOUNDATION FOR INTELLIGENT PHYSICAL AGENTS

 

Document title:

Information Agent Work Plan

Document number:

f-in-00012

Document source:

(see author below)

Document status:

Input

Date of this status:

2000/07/16

Change history:

2000/04/19

Initial Draft

2000/07/16

FAB comments (see end)

 

                                                          Luís Miguel Botelho

                                                       <luis.botelho@iscte.pt>

 

This work plan is concerned with the development of an agent or a multi‑agent system to maintain and serve useful FIPA information for other agents and humans.

 

Problem Statement: Most information defined in FIPA Specifications (e.g., languages, transport profiles, FIPA protocols) is useful for humans as well as for agents. However, this information is available only for human users, through the documents that make up the Specifications. The Problem of this work plan is the identification of the information that should be accessible by other agents and by humans and the development of an agent or a set of agents to maintain and serve this information to other agents and possibly to humans.

 

Objective: Two goals will be achieved with this work plan. The first goal will be the development of an agent capable of maintaining useful information for other agents and for humans. The second goal is the implementation of another interoperability test.

 

Technology: This work plan will use and/or contribute to the development and possible standardization of three kinds of technologies:

·         Ontology technologies

General ontology representation and organization, representation of formal grammars, representation of transport profiles, representation of protocols.

·         Interoperability technologies

Transport protocols, agent‑platform interaction

·         Technology for information organization and retrieval

This is for human user purposes. Textual information organization, retrieval and presentation.

 

Specifications Generated: This work plan will be able to validate and contribute for FIPA Specifications in general, mostly for agent management specifications, agent communication specifications and for ontology specifications.

 

Plan for Work: The technical committee constituted by this work plan will take overall responsibility for producing a document describing the problem to be tackled, the requirements of the project and the specifications of the information agent. More specifically, the document will:

·         Identify the FIPA information that should be accessible to human users through an information agent

·         Identify the FIPA information that should be accessible to other agents through an information agent

·         Write the list of requirements of the human‑oriented information agent

·         Write the list of requirements of the agent‑oriented information agent

·         Write the specifications of the human‑oriented information agent including but not limited to the information model, the knowledge model, the general conceptual and computational approach and the user‑interface

·         Write the specifications of the agent‑oriented information agent including but not limited to the information model, the knowledge model, the general conceptual and computational approach and the inter‑agent interface

 

         The technical committee constituted by this work plan will also be responsible for supervising the development of the specified information agent(s).

 

Milestones:

 

Future Work: Since the FIPA Specifications have not yet come to a halt, it is expected that new specifications, new ontologies, new languages, new profiles will be generated.

 

Consequently, the future work of this TC is to create the best way to automatically update the contents of the specified information agent(s).

 

Dependencies: The specification generated by this work plan will depend, in general, on all FIPA Specifications. Nevertheless, we anticipate that the whole problem should be reduced to a manageable size. In this case, this work plan will depend on the most important specifications, namely:

·         [FIPA00001] FIPA Abstract Architecture Specification

·         [FIPA00004] Human Agent Interaction Specification

·         [FIPA00006] FIPA Ontology Service Specification

·         [FIPA00023] FIPA Agent Management Specification

·         [FIPA00079] FIPA Agent Software Integration Specification

·         [FIPAacl] FIPA Agent Communication Language Specification

 

Support:

·         Luís Miguel Botelho, ADETTI

·         Stefan Poslad, Imperial College

 

FIPA Architecture Board response:

The resolution of the work plan has been delayed until the October 2000 meeting.