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Specification of the KQML

Agent-Communication Language

plus example agent policies and architectures

The DARPA Knowledge Sharing Initiative

External Interfaces Working Group Next: Proposed Performatives

Reserved Performative Names

In this section, we define several reserved performatives. That is, they are reserved in the sense that if an implementation uses any of the following performative names in a way that is inconsistent with the following performative definitions, then that implementation is not compliant with KQML. The reserved performatives and their meanings are summarized in Table .

are re

In this section, we describe performative semantics in English prose. Since English prose is often ambiguous and sometimes self-contradictory, we have developed a framework for formal definition of performatives. A full description appears in a separate paper [Genesereth et al.].

Definitions of new performatives should follow the style of the definitions in this section. That is, a definition should convey the following:

• the performative name;
• all parameters keywords that the performative may contain;
• syntactic categories and semantics for all values of parameters with non-reserved keywords;
• any additional syntactic and semantic constraints for values of parameters with reserved keywords;
• the default values of all absent parameters;
• the semantics, in terms of a statement the sender is making of itself, of the performative name applied to the parameters.

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• Basic informative performatives
• Database performatives
• Basic responses
• Basic query performatives
• Multi-response query performatives
• Basic effector performatives
• Generator performatives
• Capability-definition performatives
• Notification performatives
• Networking performatives
• Facilitation performatives