The JADE Board
is pleased to announce the first release (version 1.0) of the JADE
Semantics Add-On. This new add-on, developed by France
Telecom in the context of the JADE Board, aims at taking better benefit
from the semantic dimension of the FIPA-ACL language, which is currently not
explicitly taken into account in the JADE platform.
At a basic level, this new framework checks syntactic and semantic consitency
of received and sent messages (for example, it is not possible to send an Inform
message with a content representing an action instead of a proposition). At
a higher level, “semantic agents” developed upon this framework automatically
handle each incoming message and react according to its formal semantics as
specified by the FIPA standard.
For example, no explicit programming is required to handle a Query-Ref, a Call-For-Proposal
or a Subsribe message. To this end, a proper API has been defined to customize
the behaviour of semantic agents. Roughly speaking, developing a semantic agent
mainly consists in setting up its initial knowledge, its knowledge query rules,
the domain-specific actions it is expected to handle, and in customizing its
generic interpretation behaviour (such as its cooperative abilities).
The add-on is distributed open source under the same license terms as the main
JADE framework. It is available for download
in the add-on section (remind to login first). It can also be exported from
the subversion
repository. A complete documentation about the semantics add-on will be
shortly available.
Moreover, a tutorial will be given on 29th July at the next AAMAS
conference in Utrecht during the JADE Workshop session. The workshop
programme includes also a tutorial on the JADE
Web Services Integration Gateway add-on and a tutorial on the JADE Kernel-level
services; furthermore a final discussion will provide the opportunity to hear
from JADE practitioners and users wishing to share their experiences in an open
discussion.