FOUNDATION FOR INTELLIGENT PHYSICAL AGENTS

 

Resolutions of the 25^th FIPA meeting in Vancouver, Canada
May 6-10, 2002.

 

 

 

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

 

The Board decided on the following resolutions

1. Creates the TC Services (chair David Levine, co-chair Jonathan Dale).
2. Asks the FAB to create a process at the 26^th meeting to manage informative specifications so that they will still be proper outputs of FIPA.
3. FIPA will experiment remote-participation during the 26^th FIPA meeting in Helsinki, via call-in numbers and video conferences if requested, 
4. Therefore, in order to adapt the working practice of technical committees, work groups and special interest groups; the chairs must publish their detailed workplan well before the meeting on the FIPA home page.
5. Thanks Dominic Greenwood for his work in co-chairing the Ontology TC
6. Mandates TC Ontology and TC Semantics to propose co-chairs helping the TC Chairs in their missions. The Board will nominate co-chairs for these TCs prior to next meeting
7. Asks the membership and nomination committee to start the activity of nominating the new board members at the 27^th meeting.
8. Mandates the Image Committee to keep close contact with the GAIN consortium to promote the use of FIPA technology in Canada.

 

• The times and locations of the next 2 meetings in 2002:

 

Meeting	Dates	Location	Country	Host
26th	July 22nd-26th 2002	Helsinki	Finland	Sonera
27th	October 14th-19th 2002	Pensacola	US	IHMC

 

2.        FIPA approves the Secretariat’s report of the previous three months (f-out-00114).

FIPA requests that the secretariat remind all committee chairs to update their relevant sections of the FIPA website with current information.

 

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

 

FIPA Architecture Board Resolutions

 

1.        Accepts and approves the updated Ontology Work plan (f-wp-00012A)

2.        Accepts the updated work plan from the Security WG as input for review and anticipates approving Security WG taking ownership of Policy and Domain Specification (PC00089)

3.        Part of the Security WG work plan dealing with fixes to existing specs assigned to X2S

 

 

4.        Requests that Ontology TC and Semantics TC be scheduled for a joint working session during the 26^th meeting.

5.        Draws attention of the membership to the ongoing X2S work and requests their continued review of the revised specifications

 

6.        Thanks: Jonathan Dale, Fabio Bellifemine, David Levine for their work during this meeting.

7.        Thanks the membership for their ongoing contributions to the architecture process

 

 

TC Ad-hoc resolutions

1. Consideration of three identified issues: platform discovery, service discovery, additional features
2. Decision: handle service discovery at the agent level
3. Write a white paper about relevant technologies for FIPA agents in mobile ad-hoc environments and possible solutions for predefined problem areas as an input paper for FIPA26 including:
1. Platform discovery mechanisms

                                                               i.      Discussion of relevant platform discovery protocols and FIPA specific adaptations

2. Service Discovery mechanisms

                                                               i.      Discussion of infrastructure elements needed for ad-hoc support

                                                              ii.      Discussion on message exchange on agent level

                                                            iii.      Discussion of service discovery protocols

3. Additional features

                                                               i.      Discussion of mechanisms to support policies and security in ad-hoc environments

4. Contribute to white paper over TC ad-hoc reflector, possibly meeting at AAMAS2002
5. Contact TC Semantics to discuss ACL broadcast / multicast
6. Contact WG Security to discuss security issues in ad-hoc environments

 

7. Thanks to: Heikki Helin, Kari Koivuniemi, Heimo Laamanen, Jamie Lawrence, James Odell, Makoto Okada, Stefan Poslad, Olga Ratsimor, Bobbin Teegarden, Michael Berger.

 

 

TC Ontology resolutions

1. Change of co-chair
2. Circulate new work plan
3. Provide input to WebOnt for agent requirements on ontologies before next meeting
4. Define a second work which supports meta-ontology requirements
5. To work on the white paper, to have a version of the white paper on requirements for the next FIPA meeting
6. Inputs on ontology server and upper ontologies input (intention to input and what this will be mid June end June)
7. Attendees and Thanks to Stefan Poslad, Kiyoshi Kogure, Munchurl Kim, Makoto Okada, Monique Calisti, Jonathan Dale, Mike Kersetter, Bobbin Teegarden, Patricia Charlton

 

 

TC Semantics resolutions

 

1. Ad-hoc networking broadcasting issue to be investigated
2. Ad-hoc to be discourages from using ACL to sort out LAN topology
3. Pat Hayes (IHMC) to be asked for input
4. To draft a white paper that:
1. Identifies the form and features of the FIPA Semantic Framework
2. Captures the relevant features of, primarily Andrew Jones, Marek Sergot’s, Marco Colombetti’s  semantic framework
5. Frank McCabe will be driving the document development. Input is welcome. This draft will be prepared in advance of FIPA26.
6. Interim meeting planned, details to be published, hosting offered by TI Labs,
1. Focus on white paper
2. Discussion on weak versus strong typed content languages
7. Thanks to: Patricia Charlton, Abe Mamdani, Jim O’dell, Frank McCabe (by phone), Mike Kerstetter, Misty Nodine, David Levine, Monique Calisti, and Dominic Greenwood for their work during this meeting.

 

TC Services resolutions

1. Services TC invites the membership to join us for a scheduled interim meeting:

o        HP Palo Alto, June 12 and 13, 2002

o        Phone bridge will be available

o        Logistics details will be provided on the chat reflector (services@fipa.org)

2. Invites the membership to comment on proposed WebServices bindings which will be discussed on the services reflector

o        Messaging

o        Bootstrapping services / Directory

3. Invites the membership to comment on Whitepaper drafts which will be discussed on the services reflector
4. Requests the advice and assistance of the membership in developing material to approach related standards bodies, including W3C, OASIS and WSI
5. Thanks: Monique Calisti, Mike Kerstetter, Dominic Greenwood, Stefan Poslad, Jonathan Dale, Abe Mandami, Heimo Laamanen, Michael Berger, Kiyoshi Kogure, Bernard Burg, Patricia Charlton, and David Levine for their input during the TC meeting

 

 

 

 

TC X2S resolutions

 

The X2S TC recommends FIPA to approve the following resolutions:

1. recommend FIPA to publish the minutes of this X2S meeting, the list of approved changes, and all the modified specifications in the public X2S area of the FIPA Web site for review from the entire community. All membership is invited to carefully consider and review all the approved changes that, in some cases, breaks compatibility of the existing implementation.
2. recommend FIPA members and/or developers to submit more comments for consideration during the next meeting
3. appoint Jonathan Dale to report at the next X2S meeting in Helsinki about how JINI and DHCP implement the lease-time for yellow-page subscription
4. recommend FIPA members to submit a workplan for finalizing the work on the fipa-subscribe Interaction Protocol
5. recommend FAB to produce a guideline document for maintenance of the specifications and publish it on the public area of the Web site (see for instance the doc. no. 61 and doc. no. 37)
6. recommend FIPA to publish all the application-related specifications as informative documents, in particular the following documents: Personal Assistant (83), Network Management and Provisioning (82), Audio-visual Entertainment and Broadcasting (81), Personal Travel Assistance (80), part of Nomadic Application Support (14).
7. Invite membership to collect information about implementation and usage of FIPA specifications
8. recommend FIPA to produce and approve a document with the list of all the symbols defined by FIPA and a pointer to the specification number where it has been defined and where it has been used. If FIPA approves that, than X2S will consider to produce it in Helsinki (if there will be enough volunteers to do that!).
9. the following specifications have been identified not to be proposed for standard status considered that X2S is not aware of any implementation:
1. spec no. 76, WAP MTP
2. spec no. 92, Message Buffering Service
3. spec no. 93, Message Interoperability Service

this decision can be reconsidered if, before the next FIPA meeting, X2S was made aware of any existing implementation or of any FIPA member still wishing to propose them to standard         

10. thank all those people who have contributed to the meeting by sending comments or by actively participating to the discussion

 

Security WG resolutions

1. The FIPA Security WG proposes the following resolutions:
1. To progress with work on its new work-plan (f-wp-00011):
2. To provide input on security related uses, such as the use of the encryption field in the message transport specification, to the X2S TC, at least 1 week before the 26th FIPA meeting;
3. To take interim ownership of the Policies and Domain Specification (PC00089) in order to add some use-cases for trust and security policies;
4. To address the requirements raised in the completed security white-paper.
2. To provide input on trust and security issues into the Adhoc TC’s forthcoming white-paper, F4B TC’s white-paper and the Ontology TC’s white-paper.
3. That Makoto Okada of Fujitsu be thanked for his presentation on  “P2P service platform - VPC(Virtual Private Community)” at this WG meeting.
4. That the FIPA membership and FIPA community be thanked for its input into the completed security white-paper (f-out-000113).
5. That the following be thanked for their active input at this meeting: Monique Calisti, Patricia Charlton, Cobzaru Mircea, Makoto Okada, Ray Staron, and Stefan Poslad.  (Apologies are offered to anyone whose name was omitted.).

 

Liaison SIG resolutions

The liaison SIG proposes that FIPA adopt to:

1. Secretariat to contact membership and gather their contribution to complete the existing links in the Liaison pages, in particular the university contacts.

Jacquie Kelly, May 31, 2002

2. Liaison SIG to identify standard bodies of relevance to FIPA and present them to the FIPA membership during next meeting
3. Liaison SIG to propose a way to approach and liaise with other standard bodies, and present it to the Board during next meeting

 

FIPA for Business Applications SIG (F4BA) resolutions

1. F4BA decided to contact several FIPA members and non-members having expressed their interest to contribute to the white paper and collect their input before the Helsinki meeting,
2. F4BA decided to distribute the white paper via the image mailing list.

 

Planning and Scheduling SIG resolutions

1. The Planning and Scheduling SIG would like to thank all 17 of the participants for their participation at this meeting (13 of which were from GAIN).
2. Continue gathering knowledge from various organizations that have employed agent-based planning and scheduling.

 

Image Committee resolutions

1. A more detailed summary (bunch of slides) of the Image Committee discussion will be sent to the image mailing list and to the FIPA secretariat (Responsible: Monique).
2. FIPA Inform! newsletter:

• Collecting INPUT for the FIPA Inform! Newsletter Vol. 3, Issue 2 in coordination with the FIPA secretariat (Monique, Jacquie)

     (due to image@fipa.org by 15 May, 2002)

Meeting Report (B. Burg on behalf of Frank)

News in brief (J. Kelly)

Vancouver workshop report (M. Ulieru)

TC X2S report (Fabio: already in)

Technology overview: FIPA and Web Services (D. Levine)

Member profiles:

Queen Mary (S. Poslad), Whitestein Technologies (M. Calisti)

        Announcement corner (Monique)

 

• Call for the next Newsletter: circulate around the list of selected input – deadline post Helsinki (Monique)

     (due to image@fipa.org by 31 July, 2002)

Meeting Report (Frank)

News in brief (J. Kelly)

Helsinki workshop report (Heimo)

TC report: Agents in Ad Hoc environments (Michael)

Technology overview: Service description (Miriam, Patricia)

Member profiles:

A Japanese company, UPC (U. Cortes)

        Announcement corner (Monique)

 

 

• Distribution of FIPA Inform (vol. 3 Issue 1) for the end of May at the Japanese Society of Artificial Intelligence (Monique contacts Mr. Iwata, Kogure will act as the local representative)
• Publication in a Japanese paper: Suguri will write a paper about FIPA (October 2002)

 

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3. Web Image (FIPA secretariat, Monique, Jonathan, Bernard, Stefan):

• AP monique: Ask Jacquie to put a direct link to „What FIPA does“ (presentation slides) from the main Web page
• Clean up of existing mailing lists (AP Monique: ask Jacquie to update the page –web services mailing list)
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4. Circulate the list of relevant initiatives (FIPA secretariat, Monique)

• AAMAS02, 15-19 July in Bologna (FIPA sponsored)
• 26th FIPA meeting, 22-26 July in Helsinki (Finland)

 

 

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

 

Name	Affiliation
Mike MacDonald	Cisco Systems, Canada
Michael Levy	NewHights Co, Canada
Ahmed Karmouch	U. of Ottawa
Ramiro Liscano	Mitel Networks, Canada
Bernard Moulin	U. of Laval
Julita Vassileva	U. of Saskatchewan
Mohamed Kamel	U. of Waterloo
Ralph Deters	U. of Saskatchewan
Soumaya Cherkaoui	U. of Sherbrooke
Pavel Vrba	Rockwell Automation, Czech Republic

 

 

2.        FIPA thanks University of Calgary for offering FIPA excellent meeting facilities and friendly support in Vancouver, Canada and for hosting its 25^th meeting, in particular: Mihaela Ulieru, Cynthia Karincolas, Garrett Camp, and the FIPA secretariat Jacquie Kelly.

 

3.        FIPA expresses thanks to the GAIN consortium, for fruitful interactions between the GAIN and FIPA members.

 

4.        FIPA invites its membership and contributors to the FIPA process to its 26^th meeting, July 22^nd-26^th, 2002 in Helsinki, Finland, to be hosted by Sonera Corporation.