Modelling Agent Communication Languages

This paper proposes the use of the Unified Modelling Language (UML) as a formalism for defining an abstract syntax for Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) and their associated content languages. It describes an approach supporting a formal automatic mapping from high-level abstract specifications of language structures to specific computer language bindings and in-memory structures that can be directly used by an agent platform. Some advantages of this approach are that it provides a formal framework for specifying and experimenting with alternative agent communication languages, reduces the error-prone manual process of generating compatible bindings and grammars for different syntaxes. A proof-of-concept prototype implementation supporting an automatic conversion from abstract communication language expressed in UML to a native Java API and a Resource Description Framework (RDF) serialisation format is described.