FOUNDATION FOR INTELLIGENT PHYSICAL AGENTS

Document title

Resolutions from the Palermo, Italy, February 2003 Meeting

Document number

f-out-00140

Document source

Board of Directors

Document status

Preliminary

Date of this status

Date as: 2003/02/12

Change history

 

Initial draft

 

Resolutions of the 28th FIPA meeting in Palermo, Italy
February 10-12, 2003.

 

1.      FIPA activities

 

·        The composition of the FIPA Architecture Board has become as follows:

 

Name

Affiliation

Country

Fabio Bellifemine (Chair)

TILAB

Italy

Jonathan Dale

Fujitsu Labs US

US

David Levine

IBM

US

Misty Nodine

Telcordia

US

 

 

Meeting

Dates

Location

Country

Host

29

August 20-22, 2003

Calgary

Canada

University of Calgary, co-located with Industrial Informatics (INDIN03)

29

June 16-18 / 23-25, 2003

Prague

Czech Republic

TBD, co-located with CEEMAS03

30

November 17-19, 2003

London

UK

TBD, co-located with OMG

 

2.      FIPA requests that the secretariat remind all committee chairs to update their relevant sections of the FIPA website with current information.

 

3.      The board will continue to work on the strategic positioning of FIPA and its activities with respect to other relevant standardization bodies.

 

4.   Resolutions of Technical Committees, Working Groups, and Special Interest Groups:

 

FIPA Architecture Board Resolutions

The FIPA Architecture Board proposes that FIPA adopt the following resolutions:

-         Services, Jonathan Dale, Margaret Lyell

-         Security, Stefan Poslad

-         Modeling, James Odell

-         Methodology, Massimo Cossentino ad interim

-         Interaction Protocols, Gabriel Hopmans ad interim

-         Infrastructure: Ad-Hoc WG, Services TC, Security TC

-         Communication: Ontology TC, Semantics TC

-         Software Engineering: Interaction Protocol TC, Modeling TC, Methodology TC

TC chairs are responsible for organizing their activities and cross-TC intra-cluster relationships, including time and technology dependencies

 

WG Ad-hoc Resolutions 

The WG Ad-hoc proposes that FIPA adopt the following resolutions.

-         Further analysis / classification of relevant existing ad-hoc and P2P technologies / mechanisms

-         Investigation in relevant use-case scenarios

-         Overview of possible architectures

-         Proposal of a mechanism to adopt by FIPA (focussing on scenarios, architectures, definition of service mappings)

 

TC Modeling

The TC Modeling proposes that FIPA adopt the following resolutions.

 

TC Services Resolutions

The outline of the TC Services meetings was:

The TC Services proposes that FIPA adopt the following resolutions:

-         Analyze the existing service models in existence today;

-         Produce an Abstract Service Model specification based on this analysis;

-         Produce service grounding specifications for DAML-S and Web Service;

-         Revise existing FIPA Service Descriptions specifications.

 

TC Security

The TC Security proposes the following resolutions:

 

  1. To progress with work on its new work-plan to:

·        Progress with its work-plan to produce an abstract security model and to produce concrete groundings of this model via security profiles;

·        Complete its overview of current security models and to generate the requirements and profiles for one or more concrete groundings of the model by May 2003.

  1. That the following be thanked for their active input at this meeting: Tadashi Araragi, Fabio Bellifemine, Biermarco Burrafato, Giovanni Caire, Monique Calisti, Vincent Louis, Margaret Lyell, Makota Okada, Gabriele Passantino, Sergi Robles, Takamichi Sakai, Vincenzo Savarino, Silvio Sorace and Stefan Poslad.  (Apologies are offered to anyone whose name was omitted).

 

TC Ontology Resolutions

 

This activity will focus on:

·         Send comments and inputs to on-going standardisation efforts into ontology domain (ontology representation language, upper ontologies on policies, contracts…)

·         Enabling interoperability between agent systems at the communication level by providing methods and guidelines to produce ontologies for agents (separate knowledge level from service level), and propose an upper ontology for content language (interoperability at the content language).

 

Ontology TC Ontology proposes the following resolutions:

·        Update workplan according to re-focus of the ontology TC activities (march 1st)

·        Collect comments on webONT specifications (OWL) to have a pertinent and official response from FIPA.

·        Put together specific requirements on ontologies for agents (requirements sent to webONT working group, mid-April)

·        Prepare a document where ontology requirements for agents are covered (Deadline end of April).

·        Define a new and completed version of the upper ontology (abstract content language for interoperability at the content language) proposed during the Palermo meeting based on requirements document. (Deadline: next meeting).

 

TC Methodology Resolutions

The TC Methodology proposes the following resolutions:

-         It is necessary to formally represent method fragments in order to store them in the method base. A method is essentially composed of two elements: the structure of the product (the artefact resulting from the developer activity) and the procedures necessary to construct the artefact.

-         The first phase of this TC work will aim at creating:

-         We will explicitly refer to existing standards and AOSE contributions (OMG SPEM, OPEN, Adelphe, Message, …)

 

TC Semantics Resolutions

The TC Semantics did not meet.

 

Image Committee Resolutions

 

Beside this document, some slides summarizing the Image Committee discussion are going to be sent by the Image chair (M. Calisti) to the image, the BoD and the FIPA secretariat. The Image Committee aims to improve the visibility of FIPA for enabling a better interaction of all the members and increase visibility toward the external community. Especially in this crucial period, the main concern is to ensure visibility and facilitate the contribution of the whole industrial and scientific community to FIPA.

The Image Committee proposes the following resolutions:

 

-         Goal: primarily to attract interest from external organizations, and thereby to inform people about what is going on in FIPA

-         Target: outside world (that is not necessarily aware of how things work inside the community) and the FIPA community

-         Structure:

§         Technology overview: invited people, ad hoc or global calls.

§         FIPA report on various activities (TCs, WGs, SIGs)

§         Announcements corners

§         A space for advertisements? Still open issue

-         Procedure and guidelines:

§         Ad hoc calls

§         Open calls

§         Review process: case by case

§         1 issue after every meeting

-         Distribution:

§         UMBC mailing list

§         DAI mailing list

§         AgentLink, AgentCities

§         Platforms lists (both FIPA and non-FIPA), chat list

§         PISA project

§         ontoWeb mailing list

-         Volume 4 issue 1:

§         Issue due by end of April 2003:

§         We should discuss today about content:

§         Meeting Report (President)

§         News in brief (J. Kelly)

§         Palermo workshop report (Vito and Massimo)

§         FIPA scope and current activities overview (activities track description) – FAB/BoD – Jonathan Dale

§         Technology overview - what is DAML-S, W3C activity, its future, link to FIPA – ask David Martin (interview kind of article)

§         Business input: open call (Monique will invite Navi Radjou from Forrester)

§         Member profiles: Telcordia (Misty Nodine, to be asked)

§         Announcement corners: 6th EU calls! (Monique)

·        Liaisons: The goal is to keep strong liaison, clarify scope and objectives, create visibility and awareness (relevant events and activities of mutual interest)

-         OMG (contact person Jim Odell)

-         ontoWeb (contact person Monique)

-         WebOnt (contact person Jonathan)

-         Semantic Web (contact person Tim Finin to be asked)

-         Agentlink (contact person Monique)

-         Agenticties (contact person Jonathan)

-         ObjectWeb (contact person Monique)

-         Holonic Manufacturing (contact person Mihaela Ulieru)

-         The secretariat and the IC should make sure important FIPA related events are advertised on the chat mailing list. For specific particularly relevant events we should take into account the announcement corner of the FIPA Inform! Newsletter.

-         Image has an important role in collecting input for the F4BA white paper and distributing output toward the outside community. We will make sure we keep that in mind and we will work on that.

 

5.   FIPA thanks the following individuals for participating in and making valuable contributions to the FIPA Workshop:

 

Name

Affiliation

Vito Morreale

Engineering Ingegneria Informatica

Giovanni Caire

TILAB

Massimo Cossentino

University of Palermo

 

6.   FIPA thanks Engineering Ingegneria Informatica for offering FIPA excellent meeting facilities and friendly support in Palermo, Italy, and for hosting its 28th meeting, in particular: Giuseppe Sajeva and his team, and also the FIPA Secretariat Jacquie Kelly.

 

7.      FIPA invites its membership and contributors to the FIPA process to its 29th meeting, dates and location to be announced shortly.