UMBC ebiquity
Third International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management,
A semantics approach for KQML -- a general purpose communication language for software agent
November 1, 1994
We investigate the semantics of Knowledge Query Manipulation Language (KQML), and we propose a semantic framework for the language. KQML is a language and a protocol to support communication between software agents. Based on ideas from speech act theory, we propose a semantic description for KQML that associates descriptions of the cognitive states of agents with the use of the language's primitives (performatives). We use this approach to describe the semantics for the basic set of KQML performatives. We also investigate implementation issues related to our semantic approach. We suggest that KQML can offer an all-purpose communication language for software agents that requires no limiting pre-commitments on the agents' structure and implementation. KQML can provide the Distributed AI, Cooperative Distributed Problem Solving, and Software Agents communities with an all-purpose language and environment for intelligent inter-agent communication.