Re: interesting post - AI Agent Protocols, the HTTP of AI agents—a shared language for coordination

You might also be interested in this paper with Wooldridge, where we discuss the relationship between old school, FIPA-ACL-style agents and modern agents, as well as in general what lessons we can learn from traditional multi-agent systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21298


Although I'd argue that ontology-based languages do not map well to modern, general-purpose, NL-based agents. See here for more on our research side
https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.11905


Best,

Samuele Marro
Department of Engineering Science
University of Oxford


________________________________
Da: s.mariani@unimore.it <s.mariani@unimore.it>
Inviato: giovedì, luglio 3, 2025 11:19:35 AM
A: Joshua Cornejo <josh@marketdata.md>
Cc: public-webagents <public-webagents@w3.org>
Oggetto: Re: interesting post - AI Agent Protocols, the HTTP of AI  agents—a shared language for coordination

Hello everybody :)

I have been not particularly active in the group, but I’m noticing (also beyond this group) a lot of discussion around these “agent protocols” and I cannot help but think that there is a lot of “reinventing the wheel” that is happening.

Coordination between agents is a long standing topic in research about software engineering and distributed artificial intelligence.

These are just a bunch or random references that I have on the top of my mind while at the swimming pool, so bear with me if I am not exhaustive, but I think everybody interested in this new breed of “agentic systems” should at least be aware of.

FIPA has done much to bring agent technology to production ready systems:
 - communication language and semantics http://www.fipa.org/repository/aclspecs.html

 - http specs http://www.fipa.org/specs/fipa00084/PC00084B.html

 - coordination protocols http://www.fipa.org/repository/ips.php3


A whole lot of research has also been done in multiagent systems coordination with alternative paradigms such as tuple based coordination, although perhaps with less TRL

I can provide further refs and info if interested, this initial refs were just out of being tired of seeing over and over this way of selling “Agentic coordination protocols” as something new as in fact there have been at least 30+ years of research and dev on the topic.

I go back to the shadows now :)
Bye!

Stefano Mariani, PhD
Tenure track researcher
@ Department of Sciences and Methods for Engineering – University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
> stefano.mariani@unimore.it<mailto:stefano.mariani@unimore.it>
> https://smarianimore.github.io<https://www.google.com/url?q=https://smarianimore.github.io&source=gmail-imap&ust=1677865643000000&usg=AOvVaw3kYSdJbofexYY9CLIsriBn>

Il giorno 3 lug 2025, alle ore 10:37, Joshua Cornejo <josh@marketdata.md> ha scritto:


https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-agent-protocols-http-agentsa-shared-language-coordination-mtute/


___________________________________
Joshua Cornejo
marketdata<https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.marketdata.md/&source=gmail-imap&ust=1752136670000000&usg=AOvVaw3uCHYFriHbhDH0zw1zjI3S>
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