FOUNDATION FOR INTELLIGENT PHYSICAL AGENTS

 

Resolutions of the 30^th FIPA meeting in London, England
November 19-21, 2003.

 

1.      FIPA activities:

• The Board wishes to express its profound appreciation to Michael Berger for his service on the Board for the past two years as Chair of the Finance and Auditing Committee and Chair of the Membership and Nomination Committee.  His enthusiasm, dedication, insight, and leadership were instrumental in guiding FIPA through a period of significant change.
• Several issues were proposed to the membership for vote.  A 2/3 quorum was determined to be achieved with 7 members present and 10 proxies in hand out of 22 members in good standing.
• The Audited Accounts and Projected Budget for 2003-2004 (see documents submitted by the FIPA Secretariat) were approved unanimously.
• Statute changes:
• Article 4.1, paragraph 3:
1. Original text: “The Members agree to respect all legal provisions and these Statutes concerning FIPA. Each applicant has to declare himself individually and collectively committed to open competition in the development of IPAs and supporting technologies. The Members are not restricted in any way from designing, developing, marketing and/or procuring IPAs. Members are not bound to implement or use specific agent technology standards, recommendations or FIPA specifications by virtue of participation in FIPA.”
2. Proposed text: “To apply for FIPA membership the company or organisation must supply its official name, the city, the country and maintain a list of the names and addresses of at least one and up to two official representatives.  The applicant is also required to submit a signed copy of the FIPA statutes together with the above information and the filled out Pro-Forma invoice to the FIPA secretariat. The membership becomes effective once payment and signed statues are received.  The Board of Directors does reserve the right to refuse membership if deemed in the best interest of FIPA.”
3. The proposal was passed unanimously pending review of the unannounced proposal with proxy members.  However an action item was taken by the President to further refine the text so as to achieve greater membership approval.
• Article 7.2, paragraph 2:
1. Original text:  “The Directors are selected from among the Members' employees. Up to one board member may be an employee of an associate member, all other board members are employees of principal members.”
2. Proposed text: “The Directors are selected from among the Members' employees. Up to two board members may be employees of associate members, all other board members are employees of principal members.”
3. The proposal was passed unanimously pending review of the unannounced proposal with proxy members. At the time of release of this document, sufficient proxy members had confirmed approval to ensure passage of the change.
• Article 7.1, paragraph 1:
1. Original text: “The Association shall be managed by a Board of Directors which shall have three (3) Members for the foundation act of FIPA only and an uneven number of no less than five (5) and no more than eleven (11) Members elected by the first General Assembly.”
2. Proposed text: “The Association shall be managed by a Board of Directors which shall have three (3) Members for the foundation act of FIPA only and no less than four (4) and no more than eleven (11) Members elected by the first General Assembly.”
3. The proposal was passed unanimously pending review of the unannounced proposal with proxy members.  At the time of release of this document, sufficient proxy members had confirmed approval to ensure passage of the change.
• Election of Board Members:

§         A call for nominations for four Board positions was issued in advance of the GAAM.

• Only of the nominations received, only three agreed to stand for election:
1. Monique Calisti, Whitestein Technologies.
2. Stefan Poslad, Queen Mary, University of London.
3. Jim Odell, James Odell Associates.
• All three were elected to the Board.
• In order to ensure stability, enlarge the FIPA membership basis and guarantee an effective leadership of FIPA,  the current board proposed the following:

§         The FIPA Board proposes the following changes effective from the beginning of the next fiscal year (July 2004 / June 2005):

1. A unified form of membership (no distinction between principal and associated)
2. Annual membership fee: 2250 CHF
3. All members can vote and run for election for the FIPA board of directors
4. Any change in the statutes needs a quorum of at least  ½ of the good standing members and approval of a majority of those represented

§         By June 2004 the board will submit the revised statutes eliminating references to dual levels of membership.

• The proposal was passed unanimously pending review of the unannounced proposal with proxy members. At the time of release of this document, sufficient proxy members had confirmed approval to ensure passage of the change.
• The Board nominates Mike Kerstetter from Boeing to assume the President position.  It also nominates Stefan Poslad to assume the Vice President position and the role of Board Secretary.  The Board nominates Jim Odell to the positions of chair Financial and Auditing Committee and chair of Membership and Nomination committee.  The Board nominates Monique Calisti as chair of the Image Committee and Jacquie Kelly as Treasurer.
• Tentative times and locations of the next 3 meetings:

 

Meeting	Dates	Location	Country	Host
31	Approx. March, 2004	TBD	TBD	Expressions of interest have been received from members located in Spain and Italy.  These are being pursued in more detail and a decision will be announced as soon as possible.
32 (tent.)	14-16 July, 2004	Washington DC	USA	Renato Levy, Intelligent Automation
33	27 Sep.-1 Oct., 2004	Erfurt	Germany	In conjunction with MATES 2004 conference, Dr. Rainer Unland, Organizing Chair.  Jim Odell will coordinate on behalf of FIPA.

2.      FIPA requests that the Secretariat update Board-related mailing lists as appropriate and 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 and Statements of Technical Committees, Working Groups, and Special Interest Groups:

TC Ad-hoc Resolutions 

TC Ad-Hoc had discussions about current specification draft. The following decisions were taken:

·        Extend the current FIPA Agent Management specification in order to meet the requirements of yellow page services in ad hoc networks

·        Approve the need for a standard way of advertising FIPA agent services in JXTA technology

·        Further editing of the FIPA Agent Management specification and fipa00096 is needed and will be completed by FIPA31

·        Open points to discuss at the next meeting:

o       Profile of the DF capabilities

o       Finalisation of changes to FIPA Agent Management specification

o       Finalisation of fipa00096

TC Ad hoc thanks: Fabio Bellifemine, Michael Berger, David Cabanillas, Monique Calisti, Giancario Fortino, Xuan Huang, Ben Mankin, John Shepherdson, Rainer Unland, Juan Jim Tan, Yanmin Xi.

TC Modeling

• The Modelling TC participants reached a basic agreement on an abstract syntax (in the form of a class diagram) that specifies the notions of agent, agent class, role, group for modeling agent-based systems.  Furthermore, it was agreed that these areas would be explored and defined in more detail by this TC.
• The Modelling TC participants agreed to explore the notions of position, environment, and context.  It also agreed to begin adding agent properties such as capabilities, goals, and so on.
• The Modelling TC participants agreed to continue the refinement of the FIPA AUML language specifications for Class Diagrams and Sequence Diagrams.

The Modelling TC would like to express its appreciation to those individuals who participated in both Modeling TC meetings.

TC Semantics Resolutions

 The outline of the TC Semantics meeting is as follows:

• A draft of a revised work plan was submitted consideration at the Opening Plenary
• The first in a series of presentations: “On Eliciting Requirements for Agent Semantics from Linguistics Concepts" was given by Everett Sherwood (Motorola Laboratories).
• Included in the first talk were:
• The Need for Semantic Requirements
• A Rationale for Using Linguistics as a Source of Requirements
• An Overview of Semantic Exchange
• A Description of Low-Level Semantics and their Use in Agent Requirements
• Various Draft Requirements
• A Presentation on: “An Executable Specification of Open Norm-Governed Computational Systems” by Alexander Artikis, Marek Sergot, and Jeremy Pitt was given by Alexander Artikis,

TC Semantics resolves to:

• Develop a Set of requirements as a Basis for further work
• To this end, a statement of goal was drafted by Mike Uschold

TC Semantics would like to express its appreciate to those individuals who participated in both meetings and particularly Alexander Artikis for his participation.

Image Committee Resolutions

Activities since last meeting:

• Reapportion tasks and coordinate with the FIPA Secretariat and the rest of the Image committee and FIPA Board concerning:
• Web site aspects
• Sponsorship
• Liaisons (in particular with incoming EU projects – AgentLink 3)
• Fipa Inform! Newsletter Vol. 4, Issue 1: available on the web site
• Fipa Inform! Newsletter Vol. 4, Issue 2: during this meeting the goal is to define the content for this issue that we aim to publish by the end of this year/beginning 2004
• Outside image
• Input on a book chapter about FIPA specs and current activities written by Steven Willmott
• FIPA presence in AAMAS 03: many thanks to Jonathan Dale, Steven Willmott, and Stephen Cranfield
• FIPA presentation for IDIN03 (M. Berger, Banff, Canada, August 2003)
• FIPA presentation for Agentcities Public Information Days 4 (M. Calisti, Helsinki, Finland,  August 2003)
• Any other input we are not aware of? Just contact secretariat@fipa.org
• Liaisons: update and new actions
• A direct link has been established with W3C: the Board is following up on that
• Web Image
• Maintenance of relevant projects / activities / liaisons page, articles and presentations
• Link to relevant related events update
• Update of  What‘s New

At this meeting the following issues were discussed:

• Collect input about relevant events:
• Eumas 03 (18-19 December -Oxford) – Monique contacts F. Zambonelli asking for a FIPA spot Stefan Poslad will be there and he could take care of the presentation
• AAMAS’04 – request for sponsorship, 1000 US dollars (board approval)
• AgentLink 3 Industrial Day (when?) – request for sponsorship, 500 Euro eventually (the board will have to approve that, if needed)
• AgentLink 3 Summer School (when) – FIPA tutorial; Monique will take care of the liaison
• IEEE SMC Conference, October 2004, Delfth, Netherlands – it would be good to have FIPA presence and papers eventually selected for special Issue of IEEE SMC
• Collaborative Agent Systems and Applications TC (Fabio is part of the TC)

·        Circulate call for paper in the FIPA chat mailing list and encourage publication

• NODes 04, September 2004, Erfurt, Germany – possible co-location with FIPA 3^rd FIPA meeting 2004
• Collect input/feedback about main liaisons
• Establish liaison with Jade Board – Monique and Fabio coordinate Jacquie
• Establish liaison with AgentLink 3 – Monique
• openNet – depending on whether it will be accepted or not by EU Commission
• Establish liaison with @Lis (EU project bringing Agentcities into Central and South America) – Monique asks Steven Willmott
• Sponsorship requests
• Next FIPA meetings
• Discuss about the FIPA Inform! Newsletter Vol. 4 Issue 2
• Next issue content
• Global issue: opening to the outside world

Many thanks to Fabio Bellifemine, Michael Berger and Stefan Poslad.

TC Security

The main achievements at the meeting were discussions related to:

·        Part 1 of the meeting: the presentations made at the Security TC meeting

·        Part 2 of the meeting:  discussion of the FIPA f-in-00095 proposal. Need to add:

·        Scenarios and requirements

·        Clarification of attributes in the frame-based ontology for message security:

o       Which are optional

o       How to specify list of reserved values extensible

o       Etc.

·        Add technical note for MTP-MTP security vs. Agent-Agent messaging security

·        Requirement and syntax for specifying sequences vs. trees vs. nesting of security wrappers

·        Use of existing specs. or notation such as PKCS-7 – any others.

o       Add a technical note to say how this related or our criticism of / differentiators from existing specs?

·        Impact on existing spec.s such as FIPA MTS spec (No. 23)

·        Namespace for terms

·        Discuss specification representation: S-expression, ASN.1,

·        Need for an XML syntax

·        Discuss how to relate this to a more general abstract security model

o       Use of an Ontology for terms, or not

 

The FIPA Security TC proposes the following resolutions:

 

1.      To progress with its work to complete its current work-plan

a.       Specification (f-in-00095) on a concrete per-message-based security specification (Giosue, TiLab) will act as editor) via email discussions and teleconference

b.      Abstract security architecture specification

c.       Analysis of current security review (synchronise this to  the completion of a preliminary specification  of a per-message based concrete security model as the review gives some of the discussions  for designing this in a certain way.

2.      That the following be thanked for their presentations at this TC Meeting: Ben Mankin (formalism for distributed authorization), Alois Reitbauer (distributed application security requirements), Jim Juan Tan (Syntax for per-message-based security) and Giosue Vitaglion (per-message security proposal).

3.      That the following be thanked for their active input at this meeting: Thierry Bouron (France Telcom, Monique Calisti (Whitestein), Sergi Robles (Univ. AB), Jim Juan Tan (QMUL), Alois Reitbauer (Profactor), Giosue Vitaglione (TiLab), Raphael Mankin (Solvfield Ltd) Ben Mankin (Univ. Bath), Rainer Unland (Uni, Duisburg-Essen) and Stefan Poslad (QMUL). Apologies are offered to anyone whose name was omitted.

TC Methodology Resolutions

TC Methodology proposed that FIPA adopts the following resolutions:

• The glossary of terms has been approved as an internal document. There will be two different kind of terms in it: a list of terms directly related to the work of this TC and a list of terms coming from common software engineering and agent contexts
• Having a direct and active contact with the OMG group of SPEM is important for this TC and further actions will be done to strengthen it
• The fragment definition document has been approved as a preliminary specification and will be published on the web site. Members are invited to use and comment the specification.
• An internal document containing a set of fragments (extracted from already SPEM documented methodologies) will be produced by next March.
• Method base repository specifications has been decided to be based on a textual document complemented by a formal XML representation according to a schema.

TC Methodologies gratefully thanks all people attending the meeting and the others contributing offline

TC Interaction Protocols Resolutions

The Interaction Protocols TC began with presentations on differing views on Interaction Protocols. These presentations presented alternative perspectives and made clearer some further work that needs to be done on the current AUML interaction diagrams. The Interaction Protocols  TC thanks the following presenters:

·        Shamima Paurobally from Southampton University for her presentation, “Developing Agent Interaction Protocols Using Graphical and Logical Methodologies”, based on work by herself as well as Jim Cunningham and Hywel Dunn-Davies from Imperial College.

·        Juan Manuel Serranofrom University Rey Juan Carlos for his presentation, “Interaction Protocols -- An Organisational State-Based Approach”.

·        James Odell and Marc-Philippe Huget for their presentation on the representation of existing interaction protocols in UML2-based AUML.

The Interaction Protocols TC agreed that the current workplan is insufficient, and resolves to develop via the email discussion a new workplan to be presented to the FAB before the next meeting. As a result of our discussion, we agreed that the workplan would span a period of two years, and include the following:

·        Collect usage scenarios from real agent systems and examining the types of interactions that they would use, but do not fit well into the current AUML or conform to any of the existing standard IPs. Examples of these include discussion threads, chats, and voting protocols.

·        Collect requirements for modelling and representing interaction protocols.

·        Work in conjunction with the TC modelling to develop a model for agent interaction that supports the types of interactions that are derived from the usage scenarios.

·        Develop a representation that can be presented (a) to humans so they can understand the interaction protocol, including detailed semantics and the assumptions that the interaction protocol places on the involved agents, (b) to agents in a machine-understandable manner, so the agents can learn the interaction protocols as needed. This representation should also support the validation of the protocols for terminating soundly, being deadlock-free, etc.

The Interaction Protocols TC thanks the participants meetings and for their contributions. This was a good meeting and we made some very good progress.

FIPA Architecture Board Resolutions

The FAB resolves:

• FAB informs the entire FIPA membership that the RFC3616 has been approved and published by IETF. It defines the ‘fipa’ URN. At the next meeting, Misty Nodine will make a short tutorial on URNs and a proposal on how FIPA can best exploit this URN.
• FAB requests the FIPA secretariat to make available to FAB and Board members the repositories of the following documents in source (.doc) format: input documents to FIPA, output documents of FIPA, workplans, specifications.
• FAB requests the FIPA secretariat to take responsibility for assigning numbers to new documents when requested by the FAB. The secretariat should take care of acquiring the necessary expertise and tools for this new activity. FAB thanks Jonathan Dale for having done this activity in the past.
• FAB wishes to create a proper software infrastructure that allows accessing (both by humans and by software) and maintaining all the catalogues that FIPA has and is going to define, including glossary of terms and definitions, catalogue of communicative acts, interaction protocols, content languages, ontologies, specifications, encodings, MTPs, ... FAB calls for proposals from the FIPA community about the requirements and the possible solutions for such an infrastructure.

TC Ontology Resolutions

TC Ontology did not meet.

TC Services Resolutions

TC Services did not meet.

5.   FIPA thanks Alexander Artikis, Imperial College for his informative presentation to TC Semantics at the 30^th FIPA GAAM.

6.   FIPA thanks the management and staff of The Hilton on Park Lane for their excellent meeting facilities and friendly support in London, and Jim Odell of James Odell Associates, Kevin Loughry of OMG and their entire team for arranging for the collocation of the 29^th meeting of FIPA and the FIPA Secretariat, Jacquie Kelly.

7.      FIPA invites its membership and contributors to the FIPA process to its 31^th meeting, dates and location to be confirmed shortly.