From Message Exchanges to Communicative Acts to Commitments

Our research aims at providing an alternative model of agent communication to the one proposed by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA). We adopt the mainstream perspective that views agent communication as the performance of communicative acts, but we shift the focus from agents' mental states to their social state. Starting from the FIPA Communicative Act Library, we provide a commitment-based semantics for a significant set of acts. This analysis leads to a classification of such acts that is to shed some light on topics that have not been dealt with in an effective way yet.