Open Source, Standards and Scaleable Agencies

Numerous agencies and agent systems are being developed or portrayed as vehicles to deliver novel types of e-commerce services to users. However service agents in one agency are probably unable to interoperate or co-operate with agents from other vendors’ agencies. Clearly, standardization in this area would help to create a more ubiquitous market for agent-based services. We analyze the relevant standards for agents, highlighting the FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) agent specification standards. Standard specifications ought to be grounded within a practical framework, which provides a reference implementation, enabling a multitude of developers to build their own implementations. We describe an open agent platform called FIPA-OS (FIPA Open Source), originating from Nortel Networks, which provides such a framework to promote the uptake of FIPA specifications by agent developers. FIPA-OS was the first agent platform to be released as open source and is being deploy...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: AGENTS
• Authors: Stefan Poslad, Phil Buckle, Rob Hadingham
• Keywords: Agent Platform, AGENTS 2000, FIPA, FIPA Open Source, Security Privacy