Resolutions of the 22^nd FIPA meeting in Sendai
July 23 – 27, 2001.

1.        FIPA notes the report of the Board of Directors concerning 

·         The continuation of FIPA beyond its initial term of 5 years, as voted upon by the membership.

·         The times and locations of the next 2 meetings: 

                  More precise times and locations will be sent to Members as soon as they become available.

·         The resignation of Rob Hadingham as Chair of the Liaison SIG, Finance & Audit Committee, and Image Committee. The Board gratefully thanks Rob for his valuable work.

·         The appointment of Bernard Burg as Chair of the Liaison Special Interest Group.

·         The appointment of Heimo Laamanen as Chair of the Finance & Audit Committee.

·         The appointment of Donald Steiner as Chair of the Image Committee.

·        The resignation of Geoff Arnold as Chair of the Membership & Nomination Committee. The Board gratefully thanks Geoff for his valuable work.

·         The appointment of Francis McCabe as Chair of the Membership & Nomination Committee

·         The resignation of Francis McCabe as Chair of the Ontology SIG.  The Board gratefully thanks Frank for his valuable work.

·         The appointment of Patricia Charlton  as Chair of the Ontology SIG.

·         The offer of a Secretariat position to a candidate in the San Francisco Bay area.

·         To incorporate the Semantics SIG and to establish a corresponding e-mail list. 

·         The appointment of Francis McCabe as Chair of the Semantics SIG.

·         To continue improving the FIPA process and refine FIPA’s strategy.

·         The approval to the Japanese Standards Association (JSA) to translate the FIPA Abstract Architecture specification into Japanese and our thanks to the JSA for offering to do so.

·         To hold an interim Board meeting on Sept. 17 in Palo Alto, California.

·         To hold the General Assembly on Oct. 10, 2001 in the San Francisco Bay area. Nominations to the Board of Directors should be submitted to the Membership & Nomination Committee.

·         To propose changes in the Statutes (in particular, IP Policy ala IETF) by Sept. 10 to the membership, for voting by the General Assembly. Other suggestions to changes to the Statutes should be submitted to the board.

·         Each TC and WG chair is requested to provide two overview slides within one week after the FIPA meetings to the FIPA secretariat: one on the scope and workplan and one on current results and future work. These will be added as part of the FIPA slide pack and to the web site.

The Board gratefully thanks the membership for their continued support of FIPA and for their confidence in the FIPA process.

2.        FIPA approves the Secretariat’s report of the previous three months (f-out-00091).

3.        FIPA approves the report of the Image Committee (f-out-00094).

4.        Resolutions of Technical Committees, Working Groups, and Special Interest Groups

TC Architecture Resolutions 

TC Architecture proposes that FIPA adopt the following resolutions. 

• To suspend work on Policies and Domains

·         To re-address this work in coming year (April 2002, at the latest).

·         To wait for and incorporate feedback from the Semantics & Ontologies work, when it becomes available.

·         To update the workplan and website accordingly.

• Service Directory Service

·         To submit a revised workplan to the FAB.

·         To submit revisions to the Abstract Architecture Spec. to the FAB.

• Abstract Content Representation.

·         Work-plan awaiting approval by FAB.

·         To submit revisions to the Abstract Architecture Spec to the FAB.

TC Architecture extends its thanks and appreciation to Martin Purvis, Patricia Charlton, Takao Mohri, Dominic Greenwood.

TC Agreement Management Resolutions 

The goal of this TC was to define dependencies between agents to allow automatic configuration and deployment of agents (typically thousands).

The work focused initially on expanding the management capabilities of the AMS, but: 

• It is not capturing the essential nature of industrial-strength management
• There is no agreement on dependencies specifications
• The TC goals cannot be successfully achieved without first specifying the policies and domains.

Therefore, TC Agreement Management proposes that FIPA adopt the following resolutions.

• To dissolve the TC Agreement Management

The need for standardisation in the area of management across platforms remains valid, but it does not need to be agent-specific. When the Domains and Policies work is completed, the Agent Configuration Management activity can continue in this new framework and a new workplan will be generated.

The TC Agreement Management gratefully thanks Bernard Burg and Jonathan Dale for the work on the Agent Configuration management specifications.

TC Gateways Resolutions 

TC Gateways proposes that FIPA adopt the following resolutions.

• To advance the Message Buffering Service proposal (PC00092) to Preliminary status (with immediate effect).
• To advance the Messaging Interoperability Service proposal (PC00093) to Preliminary status (with immediate effect).
• To update the TC Gateways workplan (align timescales with CfT) and submit to FAB for approval (by end July 2001).
• To propose changes to the MTS specification to provide buffering, transformation and transport-behaviour and submit to FAB for approval (by end July 2001).
• To propose changes to the NAS removing references to the FIPA-Subscribe Interaction Protocol and submit to FAB for approval (by end July 2001).
• To capture the requirements addressed by the Disconnected Mode Support proposal, and seek ways of satisfying them via existing specifications (by start of FIPA 23).
• To produce specifications, as per the workplan dates (preliminary specifications by FIPA22, experimental by FIPA 24).

TC Gateway gives special thanks to: Alan Treadway, Chihiro Omo, Heikki Helin, Heimo Laamanen, Hyumg-Jik Lee, Jani Leinonen, John Shepherdson, Lawrence Chang, Masataka Kawaguchi, Michael Berger, Mikko Laukkanen, Sasu Tarkoma, Satoshi Nishiyama, Shigeichiro Yamasalci, Stefan Poslad, Stefano Campadello and Yoshihiko Tokunaga.

AgentCities WG resolutions 

The AgentCities WG proposes that FIPA adopt the following resolutions:

·         To submit the Agentcities test suite document to FIPA as an input document

·         To request the creation of an Agentcities SIG to replace the Agentcities WG and act as a liaison between agentcities activities and FIPA

·         To contribute to the Bake-off/Compliance testing workplan currently being prepared for FIPA

AgentCities WG thanks Jun-ichi Akahani, Bernard Burg, Patricia Charlton, Jonathan Dale, Kiyoshi Kogure, Heimo Laamanen, Yashuhiro Murasaki, Stefan Poslad, Martin Purvis, Hiroki Suguri, Shigeichito Tamasaki, Alan Treadway, Hiroki Suguri, Steven Willmott.

Resolutions for Product Design and Manufacturing WG  

The Product Design and Manufacturing WG (PD&M WG) proposes that FIPA adopt the following resolutions:

·         To acknowledge that the PD&M WG is composed of 3 internal teams, with the following team leaders:

·         M. Ulieru            Holonic Enterprise

·         J. Odell              Planning & Scheduling

·         J. Christiansen        Shop floor/ Machine control

·         To provide an updated preliminary work plan to the FAB for review and feedback by Aug 15, 2001.  The final revised work plan incorporating suggestions will be given to the FAB by Sept. 30, 2001.
The content of PD&M work plan will only consist of major standard deliverables from each team.  However, this will not keep the 3 teams from pursuing other work plan activities to achieve their application development goals.

·         To update the FIPA and external PD&M web sites to reflect the new PD&M structure.

·         Each team leader will provide a URL link to the FIPA secretariat and PD&M chair pointing to their external team sites.

·         The external PD&M web site will be updated to reflect the new project structure jointly by PD&M chair and team leaders. Completion Aug. 15,2001

·         To remind members that discussions of the 3 team activities should occur on FIPA PD&M mailing list.  This will permit the entire PD&M WG mailing list (60-70 members) to view and jointly discuss activities of each team.

The PD&M WG would like to thank Mihaela Ulieru (Univ. of Calgary) for organizing the interim meeting of the PD&M WG, held on July 13 and 14 in Prague, CZ.

Security WG resolutions 

The Security WG proposes that FIPA adopt the following resolutions:

·         That the FIPA security Web site be updated and that the discussions held at this meeting be made available on the web-site.

·         That an interim meeting be held at Queen Mary, University of London area of Multi-Agent Security on either the 8th or 9th of August.

·         That a first draft of the Security WG white-paper be circulated to the FIPA membership within one week of the interim meeting.

·         That feedback on the RFI responses be given to respondents within one week of the interim meeting.

·         That a final draft of the white paper be completed and circulated at least one week before the 23rd FIPA meeting and that the FAB be requested to issue it as an output document after the 23rd meeting.

·         That the host of the 23rd meeting be asked to invite some proposed security experts to make representations on security relevant to FIPA at the 23rd meeting. 

·         That a new work-plan for the security WG be drafted at or before the 23rd FIPA meeting.

The Security WG thanks the following for their valuable participation: Patricia Charlton, Nina Berry, Martin Purvis, Steven Willmot, Shigeichivo Yamasaki, Yasuhiro Murasaki, Jun-ichi Akahani, Alan Treadway, Stefano Campadello, Jeremy Pitt and Stefan Poslad.  (Apologies are offered to anyone whose name was omitted.)

FIPA Architecture Board Resolutions 

The FAB proposes that FIPA adopt the following resolutions, pending final FAB approval by August 10, 2001.

• Ask the Board to create a TC for Ontologies to deal with f-wp-00012.
• Ask the submitters of f-in-00028 and f-in-00031 to combine their work plans into one work plan dealing with compliance.
• Approve the ChangeLog specification revision procedure and add it to the FAB statutes.
• Add line numbers to all of the published FIPA specifications to assist in editing the specifications.
• Send the results of the open FAB plenary session to the Bake-off Group.
• Send a list of the approved changes to the membership for final approval by 17th August 2001.
• Reject the promotion of the specifications suggested by the Bake-off Group at this time since there are comments still outstanding.
• Promotion of FIPA00088 Agent Message Transport Envelope Representation in Bit-Efficient Encoding Specification to Experimental status.
• Asks the following TCs and WGs to revise their work plans:

·         Architecture TC

·         PD&M WG

·         To note that the FIPA-subscribe Interaction Protocol specification (PC00035) has expired as of (2000/11/21) and is hereby given Deprecated Status.

The FAB would like to thank the membership for their contributions throughout the week.

Ontology SIG resolutions 

The Ontology SIG proposes that FIPA adopt the following resolutions:

·         To resubmit the workplan to the FAB

·         To issue an updated RFI and send out July 31.

·         To look at the generated use cases on their

·         Impact on other FIPA specifications

·         Provision of the

·         To build a relationship with the Semenatic Web activity of the W3C

·         To request ontology presentations at the 24^th meeting

The Ontology SIG thanks the following for their valuable participation: Dominic Greenwood, Martin Purvis, Nina Berry,Stefan Poslad, Jun-ichi Akahani, Steven Willmott, Jonathan Dale, Patricia Charlton, Jeremy Pitt.

Liaison SIG resolutions 

The Liaison SIG proposes that FIPA adopt the following resolutions:

·         More explicitly define the activities of the Liaison SIG.

·         Create a Liaison section on the FIPA Website

·         Set-up liaisons for the universities, to educate people, produce tutorials and guides to be linked with informal specifications. Stefan Poslad offers to coordinate this activity.

·         Set-up a page for relations with Agentlink in Europe and the Academic Community

·         Update the page for FIPA related projects and link to FIPA implementations

·         Set-up a page with links to ‘regional’ Agentcities and to the ‘Task Force’.

The Liaison SIG gratefully thanks all the participants to the meeting for their suggestions and the great discussions. In particular the SIG thanks the people having made presentations: PD&M Group (Nina Berry), Digital Cities (Kiyoshi Kogure), OMG (Frank McCabe), JAS (Frank McCabe), ISO for Learning Technologies (Yasuhisa Tamura), P2P activities (Donald Steiner), Agentcities (Jonathan Dale), and Bernard Burg for Chairing.

Semantics SIG resolutions 

The Semantics SIG proposes that FIPA adopt the following resolutions:

·         To set the scope of the Semantics SIG to provide a semantic framework required to account for CA, IP and agreements, contracts, policies, service models, ontologies etc.

·         The semantic framework should take into account

·         the externally visible signals, and

·         the intentional exploitation of the conventions governing those signals, and

·         the relationship between external signals and internal states

·         To edit the use cases and publish as a FIPA output document

·         To produce a workplan and submit it to the FAB

·         To create the open mailing list, semantics@fipa.org

The Semantics SIG thanks Jun-ichi Akani, Nina Berry, Bernard Burg, Patricia Charlton, Jonathan Dale, Dominic Greenwood, Masa Kawaguchi, Kiyoshi Kogure, Abe Mamdani, Francis McCabe, Takao Mohri, Jeremy Pitt, Martin Purvis, Donald Steiner and Steven Willmott.

5.        FIPA thanks the following individuals for participating in and making valuable contributions to the FIPA Workshop:

as well as Hiroki Suguri (Communication Technologies) for chairing the workshop. FIPA especially thanks NTT and the CRUMPET project for demonstrating mobile applications using FIPA. Recommendations for contributions to the next workshop should be made to Nina Berry (nmberry@sandia.gov).

6.        FIPA gratefully thanks Communication Technologies for offering FIPA excellent meeting facilities and friendly support in Sendai and for hosting its 22^nd meeting, in particular:

Mitsuyo Ono (Secretary), Shoichi Noguchi (Tohoku University), Masatoshi Miyazaki (Iwate Prefectural University), Hiroshi Nunokawa (Iwate Prefectural University), Akihiro Fujii (Miyagi University), Kouichi Abe (Sendai Foundation for Applied Information Sciences), Hiroki Suguri (Communication Technologies), Hotel JAL City Sendai, Shozankan, Eltas Travel, INTER GROUP, Sendai Foundation for Applied Information Sciences, Sendai Tourism and Convention Bureau, and Intelligent Agent Society of Japan.

7.        FIPA invites its membership and contributors to the FIPA process to its 23^rd meeting, October 8-12, 2001 in the San Francisco Bay Area, to be hosted by Sandia Labs.