Implementing agent communication languages directly from UML specifications

This paper proposes the use of the Unified Modelling Language (UML) as a formalism for defining an abstract syntax for Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) and their associated content languages. It describes an approach supporting an automatic mapping from high-level abstract specifications of language structures to specific computer language bindings that can be directly used by an agent platform. Some advantages of this approach are that it provides a framework for specifying and experimenting with alternative agent communication languages and reduces the error-prone manual process of generating compatible bindings and grammars for different syntaxes. A prototype implementation supporting an automatic conversion from an abstract communication language expressed in UML to a native Java API and a Resource Description Framework (RDF) serialisation format is described.Unpublished[1] S. Cranefield. Networked knowledge representation and exchange using UML and RDF. Journal of Digital Information, 1(8), 2001. http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/. [2] S. Cranefield and M. Purvis. UML as an ontology modelling language. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Intelligent Information Integration, 16th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-99), 1999. http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-23/cranefield-ijcai99-iii.pdf. [3] S. Cranefield and M. Purvis. Extending agent messaging to enable OO information exchange. In R. Trappl, editor, Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium “From Agent Theory to Agent Implementation” (AT2AI-2) at the 5th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR 2000), Vienna, 2000. Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies. Published under the title “Cybernetics and Systems 2000”. An earlier version is available at http://www.otago.ac.nz/informationscience/publctns/complete/papers/dp2000-07.pdf.gz. [4] S. Cranefield, M. Purvis, and M. Nowostawski. Is it an ontology or an abstract syntax? – Modelling objects, knowledge and agent messages. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Applications of Ontologies and Problem-Solving Methods, pages 16.1–16.4, 2000. http://delicias.dia.fi.upm.es/WORKSHOP/ECAI00/16.pdf. [5] M. Erdmann and R. Studer. Ontologies as conceptual models for XML documents. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Knowledge Acquisition, Modeling and Management (KAW’99). Knowledge Science Institute, University of Calgary, 1999. http://sern.ucalgary.ca/KSI/KAW/KAW99/papers/Erdmann1/erdmann.pdf. [6] T. Finin, Y. Labrou, and J. Mayfield. KQML as an agent communication language. In J. M. Bradshaw, editor, Software Agents. MIT Press, 1997. Also available at http://www.cs.umbc.edu/kqml/papers/kqmlacl.pdf. [7] FIPA. Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents Web pages. http://www.fipa.org/, 2001. [8] M. R. Genesereth and S. P. Ketchpel. Software agents. Communications of the ACM, 37(7), July 1994. [9] M. Klein, D. Fensel, F. van Harmelen, and I. Horrocks. The Relation between Ontologies and Schema-languages: Translating OIL-specifications in XML-Schema. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Applications of Ontologies and Problem-Solving Methods, 2000. http://delicias.dia.fi.upm.es/WORKSHOP/ECAI00/7.pdf. [10] S. Melnik. RDF Java API project Web page. http://www-db.stanford.edu/~melnik/rdf/api.html, 2000. [11] National Committee for Information Technology Standards. Draft proposed American national standard for Knowledge Interchange Format. http://logic.stanford.edu/kif/dpans.html, 1998. [12] Novosoft. Novosoft UML Library for Java. http://sourceforge.net/projects/nsuml/, 2000. [13] OASIS. The XML Cover pages. Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) Web site at http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/xml.html, 2000. [14] Object Management Group. OMG Unified Modeling Language Specification, version 1.3. http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/unified_modeling_language.htm, 2000. [15] Object Management Group. XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) Specification. http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/xml_metadata_interchange.htm, 2000. [16] Objects by Design. Transforming XMI to HTML. Web site at http://www.objectsbydesign.com/projects/xmi_to_html.html, 2000. [17] D. Skogan. UML as a schema language for XML based data interchange. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on The Unified Modeling Language (UML’99), 1999. http://www.ifi.uio.no/~davids/papers/Uml2Xml.pdf. [18] Sun Microsystems. JSR #000040: Metadata API specification. Java Community Process JSR, 1999. http://java.sun.com/aboutJava/communityprocess/jsr/jsr_040_mof.html. [19] T. Sundsted. Adelard, one year later. Available online at http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/javaone00/j1-00-adelard.html, 2000. [20] World Wide Web Consortium. XSL Transformations (XSLT) specification version 1.0. http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt, 1999. [21] World Wide Web Consortium. Resource Description Framework (RDF) Schema Specification 1.0. http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/CR-rdf-schema-20000327/, 2000. [22] World Wide Web Consortium. Extensible Markup Language (XML) Web pages. http://www.w3c.org/xml, 2001. [23] World Wide Web Consortium. Resource Description Framework (RDF) Web pages. http://www.w3c.org/RDF/, 2001

Generating ontology-specific content languages

This paper examines a recent trend amongst software agent application and platform developers to desire the ability to send domain-specific objects within inter-agent messages. If this feature is to be supported without departing from the notion that agents communicate in terms of knowledge, it is important that the meaning of such objects be well understood. Using an object-oriented metamodelling approach, the relationships between ontologies and agent communication and content languages in FIPA-style agent systems are examined. It is shown how object structures in messages can be considered as expressions in ontology-specific extensions of standard content languages. It is also argued that ontologies must distingish between objects with and objects without identity.Unpublished[1] agentcities.org. The Agentcities project Web site. http://www.agentcities.org, 2001. [2] F. Bergenti and A. Poggi. Exploiting UML in the design of multi-agent systems. In A. Omicini, R. Tolksdorf, and F. Zambonelli, editors, Engineering Societies in the Agents World, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1972, pages 106–113. Springer, 2000. (an earlier version is available at http://lia.deis.unibo.it/confs/ESAW00/pdf/ESAW13.pdf). [3] T. Berners-Lee. Metadata architecture. World Wide Web Consortium Discussion Document, 1997. http://www.w3.org/2000/01/sw/. [4] G. Booch, I. Jacobson, and J. Rumbaugh. The Unified Modeling Language User Guide. Addison-Wesley, 1998. [5] R. Cattell, D. Barry, M. Berler, J. Eastman, D. Jordan, S. Gamerman, C. Russell, O. Schadow, T. Stanienda, and F. Velez, editors. The Object Data Standard: ODMG 3.0. Morgan Kaufmann, 2000. [6] T. Clark, A. Evans, R. France, S. Kent, and B. Rumpe. Response to UML 2.0 request for information. http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/puml/papers/RFIResponse.PDF, 1999. [7] S. Cranefield. Networked knowledge representation and exchange using UML and RDF. Journal of Digital Information, 1(8), 2001. http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/. [8] S. Cranefield. UML and the Semantic Web. Discussion Paper 2001/04, Department of Information Science, University of Otago, 2001. http://www.otago.ac.nz/informationscience/publctns/complete/papers/dp2001-04.pdf.gz. [9] S. Cranefield, S. Haustein, and M. Purvis. UML-based ontology modelling for software agents. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Ontologies in Agent Systems, 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents, 2001. http://autonomousagents.org/2001/oas. [10] S. Cranefield, M. Nowostawski, and M. Purvis. Implementing agent communication languages directly from UML specifications. Discussion Paper 2001/03, Department of Information Science, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2001. http://www.otago.ac.nz/informationscience/publctns/complete/papers/dp2001-03.pdf.gz. [11] S. Cranefield and M. Purvis. UML as an ontology modelling language. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Intelligent Information Integration, 16th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-99), 1999. http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-23/cranefield-ijcai99-iii.pdf. [12] S. Cranefield and M. Purvis. Extending agent messaging to enable OO information exchange. In R. Trappl, editor, Cybernetics and Systems 2000: Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium “From Agent Theory to Agent Implementation” (AT2AI-2) at the 5th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR 2000), Vienna, 2000. Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies. An earlier version is available at http://www.otago.ac.nz/informationscience/publctns/complete/papers/dp2000-07.pdf.gz. [13] S. Cranefield, M. Purvis, and M. Nowostawski. Is it an ontology or an abstract syntax? Modelling objects, knowledge and agent messages. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Applications of Ontologies and Problem-Solving Methods, 14th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2000), 2000. http://delicias.dia.fi.upm.es/WORKSHOP/ECAI00/16.pdf. [14] CSELT. The JADE agent platform Web site. http://sharon.cselt.it/projects/jade/, 2001. [15] T. Finin, Y. Labrou, and J. Mayfield. KQML as an agent communication language. In J. M. Bradshaw, editor, Software Agents. MIT Press, 1997. Also available at http://www.cs.umbc.edu/kqml/papers/kqmlacl.pdf. [16] Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents. FIPA Web site. http://www.fipa.org. [17] Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents. FIPA ACL message representation in string specification. http://www.fipa.org/specs/fipa00070/, 2000. [18] Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents. FIPA SL content language specification. http://www.fipa.org/specs/fipa00008/, 2000. [19] M. R. Genesereth and S. P. Ketchpel. Software agents. Communications of the ACM, 37(7):48–53, July 1994. [20] O. Lassila and R. R. Swick. Resource Description Framework (RDF) model and syntax specification. Technical report, World Wide Web Consortium, 1999. http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-RDF-SYNTAX-19990222. [21] National Committee for Information Technology Standards. Draft proposed American national standard for Knowledge Interchange Format. http://logic.stanford.edu/kif/dpans.html, 1998. [22] Precise UML Group. The Precise UML Group home page. http://www.puml.org, 2001. [23] B. Russell. On denoting. In R. C. Marsh, editor, Logic and Knowledge: Essays, 1901-1950. Allen and Unwin, 1956. http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/Russell/denoting/. [24] World Wide Web Consortium. XSL Transformations (XSLT) version 1.0. http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt, 1999