Preface

The External Interfaces Working Group is a collection of artificial intelligence and distributed systems researchers interested in software systems of communicating agents.

The group was formed in 1990 as a part of the DARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort, with the charter to develop protocols for the exchange of represented knowledge among autonomous information systems. The principal result of this effort is KQML, the Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language. Other working groups include the Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) working group, the Ontologies working group, and the Knowledge Representations Systems Standards (KRSS) working group.

The Knowledge Sharing Effort has received some direct funding from DARPA, the NSF and AFOSR for organization and coordination. In addition, many of the members of the External Interfaces Working Group are funded through research contracts from these and other agencies.

The development of KQML has been influenced, in particular, by two prototypical agent-based systems. The first is part of the DARPA/Rome Planning Initiative, and involves wide-area communication among planning, scheduling, resource control, and temporal reasoning programs [reference?]. These programs were written in combinations of LISP, Prolog, and C++, they run on a variety of workstation platforms, and communicate over TCP/IP connections.

The second is the Palo Alto Collaborative Testbed (PACT), which demonstrated collaborative distributed design, validation, and prototyping of an electromechanical device. PACT involves metropolitan-area communication among software, circuit, power, sensor, and mechanical CAD systems [PACT-ref]. These systems were written in combinations of LISP and C/C++, they run on a variety of workstation and personal computer platforms, and communicate using either TCP/IP or SMTP (electronic mail) connections (cf. Appendix ??).

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