OMG Agent Working Group

Meeting attendance list unavailable at time of writting. Number of attendies in the order of 20 people on both Monday and Tuesday Sesions.

Presentations of the Negotiation Facility Pre-Final Submission to the Working Group by Stephen McConnell. The presentation covered the submissions approach to collaborative process management, the usage of CosNotification style event model, collaboration models supporting bilateral and multilateral agreement and promissory controls. On conclusion of the presentation questions here presented and recommendations made concerning improvements. The list of issues to be dealt with that was established at the end of the meeting covered (a) completion of the event structure specifications, (b) updating documentation to be UML compliant, (c) inclusion of a glossary.

David Kerr, from Broadcom (an Irish Telecom company) presented their work on an FIPA Platform based on an OMG infrastructure. The presentation commenced with a focus on the overlap between FIPA and the OMG. The presentation raises as a contentious issue the mandating of IIOPP as a communications infrastructure. During the presentation it was noted that no agent platform use IDL to define behavior or shell. David noted basic requirements for an Agent Platform covering distribution, scalability, language independence, services and language bindings. He went to present basic agent service requirements, including agent management, third-party software integration, and interoperability. Through the presentation the key strengths of OMG and FIPA were presented, followed by a detailed description of the Broadcom implementation. David wrapped up the presentation with a position statement outlining the complimentarily between OMG and FIPA and suggestions on actions areas with the Agent WG.

The remainder of the meeting (Monday late afternoon and Tuesday afternoon) focussed on discussion amongst the participants concerning areas of interest/priority in respect to the Agent Working Group and future issuance of RFPs. The Monday session raised issued covering extension to the FIPA IDL, agents versus objects, relationship to MASIF, directories, catalogues, brokerage, declaration (or delineation) of facilities (service capability), a UML profile for agents, objects with goals, and relationship to XML.

During Tuesday afternoon things started to converge during a working session in which a series of seven points were established and agreed as being a basis for a greenpaper. The list identified those functional areas required for agent systems, and the corresponding CORBA service that are either existing standards or currently under adoption process.

James Odell to expand the seven points a prepare a first draft of the greenpaper for presentation at the Washington Meeting.