KQML & FLBC: contrasting agent communication languages

Communication languages for agents and otherwise have been designed to minimize the size of the message and to function more as data-passing protocols. Little emphasis has been placed on the flexibility of the languages or the transparency of the message´s meaning. The author analyzes the recently defined formal semantics of KQML, which is used as the exemplar of agent communication languages. Based on this, he then specifies an FLBC message whose effects would be more or less equivalent. The purpose of this is to compare standard agent based languages (KQML in this case) with one that more directly represents the meaning of the message. The results indicate that the latter type of language makes message composition more powerful, message decomposition feasible, and has the by-product of instantly defining many more possibly useful messages.