James Odell (email@jamesodell.com) sent the following announcement to the agents mailing list today laying out the current situation on FIPA and IEEE.

FIPA, the standards organization for agents and multiagent systems, was officially accepted by the IEEE as its eleventh standards committee on 8 June 2005.

FIPA was originally formed as a Swiss-based organization in 1996 to produce software standards specifications for heterogeneous and interacting agents and agent-based systems. Since its foundation, FIPA has played a crucial role in the development of agent standards and has promoted a number of initiatives and events that contributed to the development and uptake of agent technology. Furthermore, many of the ideas originated and developed in FIPA are now coming into sharp focus in new generations of Web/Internet technology and related specifications.

Now, it is time to move standards for agents and agent-based systems into the wider context of software development in general. In short, agent technology now needs to work and integrate with non-agent technologies. To this end, the IEEE Computer Society has formally accepted FIPA to become part of its family of standards committees.

The new “FIPA Standards Committee (SC)² will start by bringing all the existing FIPA standards to the new IEEE-based organization. After that, the members and working groups of the FIPA SC, still under creation, will work to both improve existing standards and adopt new standards that the agent community vitally needs. Furthermore, the FIPA SC will expand its scope to include human and machine interaction, social and business type interactions, agent technology interoperability and other areas where the membership see fit. It will also work closely with other communities and bodies such as Semantic Web, W3C, GRID, Global Grid Forum, Web Services, BPM, etc. Within this new context, then, the FIPA SC will be able to better evolve and position itself as a unique player in the IT world — and thus help promote the deployment of software agents by end users and industry.

A presentation and discussion of the ³new FIPA² will occur at the upcoming AAMAS conference on 29 July 2005 at 10:30-12:30h. The purpose of the meeting is to both present what the FIPA SC is all about and elicit suggestions as to where it should go. In particular, this meeting will:

• Discuss the changes in the FIPA organization as it transitions to the IEEE Computer Society
• State the mission and general direction of the FIPA SC, as it currently stands.
• Indicate how to become member of the FIPA IEEE SC.
• Discuss how to contribute to the FIPA SC in this important phase and to elicit suggestions as to where it should go.
• Present a strawman set of objectives under which the FIPA SC can start operating effectively and efficiently.
• Solicit suggestions and feedback from meeting participants
• Discuss next steps, the upcoming FIPA SC meeting, and conclusion

If you have any questions about this announcement, please contact the FIPA board members at board@fipa.org.

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