Disscussion about the FIPA Interaction Protocols FIPA IP Technical Committee (IP-TC) Gabriel Hopmans Morpheus Software Maastricht, the Netherlands

Overview Introduction FIPA TC IP Short summary Agentcities Task force feedback related to FIPA Interaction Protocols Discussion 1 Association Ontology Discussion 2 Topic Maps Goal of this presentation: To find more support in the Technical Committee. (This TC is an offline experiment )

FIPA IP TC Goal: increase number of IP specs Several papers describe the need for new Interaction Protocols. Agentlink roadmap: “in the near-term but more in the medium-term future languages and protocols will be more agreed and standardized.” Activities and Work to be done Develop/find new Interaction Protocols Update of Interaction Protocol Library Specification Discussions about more dynamic IPs, automatic generation and machine readable Collaboration with Modelling TC : Feedback upon Communication Diagrams Collaboration with Metholodology TC: definition of Interaction Protocol and related terms

Summary ACTF Feedback to FIPA (1) FIPA Protocols Small number of protocols used. Due to: Number of patterns seem likely to capture many of the interaction patterns faced by business applications Used informally – implemented as simple FSM and with no link to semantics of speech-acts within messages Coordination : Protocols not easily linked to coordination relationships which may/should arise from interactions which is necessarily for use in open environments. A possible avenue of future standardisation would appear to be drawing a closer relationship between protocols and stronger FIPA semantics to enable agents to more formally rely on agreements, commitments arising from the interactions

Discussion 1 Semantics of speech acts within messages are not used. Some even claim that we maybe better reduce/or use only 2 acts: Throwing away one of the AT fundamentals? Maybe better use query languages with ‘building some intelligence around it’ What is the main problem? “A possible avenue of future standardisation would appear to be drawing a closer relationship between protocols and stronger FIPA semantics” Relation between FIPA Protocols and FIPA semantics? What does FIPA semantics means? (next slide)

Summary ACTF Feedback to FIPA (2) FIPA Semantics Performatives with defined semantics not used to date. Reasons: Developers focused on protocols first, individual messages second (FSM style implementations) Lack of reasoning tools for FIPA-SL Difficulty in combining many layers of semantics (protocol, ACL, content-language and ontology) before full semantic reasoning could take place ACTF claim: Sound machine processable semantics are essential in the long term

Association Ontology “Ontologies for Interaction Protocols”, [Cranefield et al., 2002], link last slide Design and publish ontologies describing the input and output data that are processed during protocol’s execution together with the actions and the decisions that the agent must perform Agent (developer) that has defined mapping between internal agent code and actions and decisions in an ontology would then be able to interpret any IP that is defined with reference to that ontology In the Associated ontology: define message types, reasons, preconditions

Example

Discussion (2) An associated ontology provides terminology for describing how the messages are related to each other, and also allows signatures to be defined for the operations that agents must be able to perform to use the protocol for its intended purpose Knowledge Representation of this ontology? Topic Maps as approach? OWL?

International standard, approved by ISO Specifications: ISO/IEC standard (1999), XML Topic Maps (XTM) 1.0 A form of knowledge representation optimised for information management Formal data model with XML interchange syntax Indexing and navigation paradigm for people Publishing houses, E-Learning, leading companies: Ontopia, Mondecca, Empolis Topic Maps

The 2-Layer Topic Map Model The core concepts of Topic Maps are based on those of the back-of-book index The same basic concepts have been extended and generalized for use with digital information Envisage a 2-layer data model consisting of a set of information resources (below), and a “knowledge map” (above) This is like the division of a book into content and index knowledge layer information layer (index) (content)

(1) The Information Layer The lower layer contains the content usually digital, but need not be can be in any format or notation (not necessarily XML) can be text, graphics, video, audio, etc. This is like the content of the book information layer

(2) The Knowledge Layer The upper layer consists of topics and associations Topics represent the subjects that the information is about Like the list of topics that forms a back-of-book index Associations represent relationships between those subjects Like “see also” relationships in a back-of-book index knowledge layer composed by born in composed by Puccini Tosca Lucca Madame Butterfly

Linking the Layers Through Occurrences The two layers are linked together Occurrences are relationships with information resources that are pertinent to a given subject The links (or locators) are like page numbers in a back-of-book index Puccini Tosca Lucca composed by born in composed by Madame Butterfly knowledge layer information layer

Summary of Core Topic Maps Concepts A pool of information or data –any type or format A knowledge layer, consisting of: knowledge layer information layer Associations –expressing relationships between knowledge topics composed by born in composed by Occurrences –information that is relevant in some way to a given knowledge topic = The TAO of Topic Maps, Steve Pepper Topics –a set of knowledge topics for the domain in question Puccini Tosca Lucca Madame Butterfly

Previous slides just the basics, to provoke you to search for more about Topic Maps :) META Group estimations see the Topic Maps technology significantly hitting the market by , with a potential over $1 billion. [Vatant, 2003] KTWeb Knowledge Technology Fact sheet: Topic Maps Topic Maps have a high degree of built-in semantics Topic Maps goes beyond binary relations. (Agents have N-ary roles and thus relations) Topic Maps can be easily merged and navigated with the help of scope (context) Clear notion of identity. Published Subjects are a method of establishing semantic identity. Developed under OASIS and attracted serious attention in the Semantic Web Activity of the W3C Topic Maps

Discussions on mailing list In discussions on mailing list: –Definition of Interaction Protocol – “FIPA lacks a standardized, machine readable description of the agent protocols.” –How to recognize more commonly used generic conversations ? –We need an association ontology (as in for Interaction Protocols. –Classification of Interaction Protocols Subscribe at