Standardisation categories and activities in 1997

This document has been produced at the Yorktown meeting. An ad-hoc group has been established to refine the document until the Tokyo meeting.

The standardisation work is divided into two kinds of activities

• Definition of standards, and
• Support activities / Special interest groups (SIGS)

Standardisation categories and activities

The standardisation work is divided into two kinds of activities

• Definition of standards, and
• Support activities / Special interest groups (SIGS)

Standardisation categories

1. Benchmarking
2. Communication
3. 1. Human-Agent Communication
   2. Agent-Agent Communication
   3. Agent-Software communication (API)
4. Input/Output
5. 1. Sensors
   2. 1. Audio/Speech
      2. Visual
      3. Multi-Modal input
      4. Misc. sensors
   3. Actuators
   4. Multi-Modal fusion
   5. ...
6. Information Representation
7. Privacy / Security
8. Agent societies
9. Tools and architectures
10. Personal information and personalisation
11. Execution environment for mobile agents
12. Agent Management

Support activities

1. SIG on agent taxonomies

Standardisation categories

1. Benchmarking

- Definition of reference applications
- Measurement/quantification of agent characteristics
- assessing the quality of an agent.

2. Communication

- Modes of addressing
* Topic based
* Semantic
* broad-, multi-, anycast
- Model of communication
- Protocols
* QoS negotiation
* Synchronisation and establishment of time-base
- Typical cooperative behaviour principles
- Dialogue (e.g. corrective, suggestive, over-informative, multi-threaded, answers)
- Rules of agent behaviour (e.g. commitments)
- Error detection and recovery

2.1. Human-Agent Communication

- Input/output primitives
- Selecting and accessing services
- Speech, natural language and gesture interfaces

2.2 Agent-Agent Communication

- Interactions of agent based subsystems.
- Coordination/negotiation with others
- Communication languages and delivery service, e.g. KQML, KIF, etc

2.3 Agent software communication (API's)

- Reference framework e.g. definition of domain specific vocabulary, CORBA
- OpenDoc, ...

3. Input/Output

3.1. Sensing

3.1.1 Audio/Speech

- Speech input
- Speech output
- Features for speech recognition

3.1.2. Visual

- Identification of objects and determination of their positions
- Image output
- Graphics output

3.1.3. Multi-Modal Input

- Coordination/fusion of multi-modalities

3.1.4. Misc. sensors.

- GPS, Sonars, gyros, ...

3.2. Actuators

- I/O primitives for mechanical actuators, such as Active Head-Eye Systems
- I/O for manipulation, mobility
- Specification of physical parameters

3.3. Multi-Modal fusion

- Information fusion
- Input and output facial and speech parameters
- Multimodal interaction (speech, gesture, gazing etc.)

4. Information representation

- Representation of information by content-based indexing
- Knowledge representation reference models - Rational agents and human-agent communication:
- Interworking of agent systems, e.g. languages, contents representation
- Creating and sharing ontologies

5. Privacy / Security

- Agent security (e.g. certification, security level, signalling)
- Transaction security and privacy
- Environment (e.g. other agents, user, etc.) security and privacy

6. Agent societies

Needs definition of society vs interagent communication
- Society issues
* Cooperation primitives, e.g. agreement
- Scalability of large agent communities
- Communities of heterogeneous agents
- Rules of agent behaviour (e.g. commitments)

7. Tools and Architectures

- definition generic agent programming templates
- definition of a set of agent programming primitives
- Agent toolkits incorporating an open design approach to
* development,
* maintenance
* distribution

8. Personal information and personalisation

- Standards for user profile description
- Specialisation agents system behaviours to individual user preferences

9. Execution environment for mobile agents

- Mobile execution models

10. Agent Management

- Configuration issues
- Administration and Policing
- Recommended skills list

11. Misc

- Definition of ontologies (e.g. service taxonomy)
- Directory: A standard for type management and classification trees is of critical importance for the whole architecture. Bying and Selling Agents must be able to access the available goods in a standardized form.
- Product Delivery (storage and transfer): An important issue is the representation and handling of electronic and physical goods. The agents have to arrange for the delivery of goods and ensure that a specific item is not offered in more than one place at a time.
- dynamic extensibility of complex, distributed services