Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) Meta-Ontology

A Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) Meta-Ontology is a meta-ontology for registering and serving ontologies to agents.

• Context:
  • It is solved by FIPA-ACL specifications.
  • It can be based on an OKBC Knowledge Model.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • OWL Ontology.
  • SUMO.
  • PROTON High-level Ontology.
• See: Agent Communications Language, OWL Ontology, XQuery, W3C.

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References

2017

• (Wikipedia, 2017) ⇒ http://wikipedia.org/wiki/FIPA
  • The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) is a body for developing and setting computer software standards for heterogeneous and interacting agents and agent-based systems.

FIPA was founded as a Swiss not-for-profit organization in 1996 with the ambitious goal of defining a full set of standards for both implementing systems within which agents could execute (agent platforms) and specifying how agents themselves should communicate and interoperate in a standard way.

Within its lifetime the organization's membership included several academic institutions and a large number of companies including Hewlett Packard, IBM, BT (formerly British Telecom), Sun Microsystems, Fujitsu and many more. A number of standards were proposed, however, despite several agent platforms adopting the "FIPA standard" for agent communication it never succeeded in gaining the commercial support which was originally envisaged. The Swiss organization was dissolved in 2005 and an IEEE standards committee was set up in its place.

The most widely adopted of the FIPA standards are the Agent Management and Agent Communication Language (FIPA-ACL) specifications.

The name FIPA is somewhat of a misnomer as the "physical agents” with which the body is concerned exist solely in software (and hence have no physical aspect).

2007a

• (Obitko, 2007) ⇒ Marek Obitko. (2007). “Translations Between Ontologies in Multi-agent Systems - Ontology Operations].” PhD Thesis, Czech Technical University http://www.obitko.com/tutorials/ontologies-semantic-web/fipa-ontology-service.html
  • The FIPA specifications include also Ontology Service Specification. The FIPA Ontology Service specification is not mandatory to be implemented in a FIPA compliant platform, and is still in the "experimental" state. It proposes a dedicated ontology agent (OA) to be available in FIPA agent platform for ontology related services. The role of such an agent is to provide some or all of the following services:
    • discovery of public ontologies in order to access them
    • help in selecting a shared ontology for communication
    • maintain (e.g. register with the DF, upload, download, or modify) a set of public ontologies
    • translate expressions between different ontologies and/or different content languages
    • respond to queries for relationships between terms or between ontologies
    • facilitate the identification of a shared ontology for communication between two agents

It is not mandatory that an ontology agent must provide all of these services, but every OA must be able to participate in a communication about these tasks using a defined ontology service ontology. Also, it is not mandatory that every agent platform must contain an ontology agent, but when an ontology agent is present, it must be compliant with the FIPA specifications.

2007b

• (Obitko, 2007) ⇒ Marek Obitko. (2007). “Translations Between Ontologies in Multi-agent Systems - Ontology Operations].” PhD Thesis, Czech Technical University http://www.obitko.com/tutorials/ontologies-semantic-web/fipa-ontologies.html
  • QUOTE: To allow agents to talk about knowledge and about ontologies, for instance to query for the definition of a concept or to define a new concept, a standard meta-ontology and knowledge model is necessary. This meta-ontology and knowledge model must be able to describe the primitives like concepts, attributes or relations. The ontology proposed for FIPA agents (and thus also for the ontology agent) is the frame-based OKBC Knowledge Model.

The ontology FIPA-meta-ontology based on OKBC Knowledge Model is defined to describe ontologies. This ontology must be used by an agent when it talks about ontologies. Ontology FIPA-ontol-service-ontology must be used when requesting services of an ontology agent. This ontology extends the basic FIPA-meta-ontology by symbols enabling manipulation with ontologies. These ontologies are described in a tabular form in the natural language explanation in the FIPA Ontology Service Specification.

In an open environment agents may benefit from knowing the existence of some relationships between ontologies, for example to decide if and how to communicate with other agents. In the agent community, the ontology agent has the most adequate role to know that. It can be then queried for the information about such relationships and it can use that for translation or for facilitating the selection of a shared ontology for agent communication. In the FIPA specification the relations as described in the section about relations between ontologies are proposed. The ontology agent is not required to determine these relationships, but should be able to able to maintain database of these relationships.

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