Agent Platform Agent Platform Agent Management System Directory Facilitator

t is now almost five years since the main international agent standardisation effort FIPA (the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) was founded. This issue of AgentLink News provides an update on the ongoing FIPA activities including overviews of the new structure of FIPA, recent advances, the current set of specifications, an overview of current open source implementations, and future activities. E-Commerce is widely recognised as a promising application area for agent technology. Much effort up to now has been spent on applications that help businesses distribute their goods and services to consumers in a more intelligent way. In contrast , we present here a report from Lost Wax, a company which has been concentrating on the development of agent applications in transactions between businesses , known as B2B (business to business). This issue is also filled with interesting conference, project, and site reports. For instance, you will find a report from the first concertation meeting of the EC-funded projects belonging to the Universal Information Ecosystem (UIE) initiative within the Future & Emerging Technologies Programme (FET). The UIE is a vision of a massive, scalable and flexible network that constantly scales up or down, evolves and adapts in order to meet the changing demands of its highly dynamic population, potentially consisting of millions of inter-operating autonomous infohabitants. As usual we have included some administrative information concerning AgentLink as well as a report of the first main activity of AgentLink II, the highly successful second European Agent Systems Summer School that took place in Saarbrücken, Germany this summer. Being the first issue coming through AgentLink II proper, we would like to take this opportunity to thank Mike Wooldridge for all his efforts on setting up AgentLink back in 1998. With the start of AgentLink II in August 2000, Mike stepped down as AgentLink Coordinator and handed over to Michael Luck of the University of Southampton. Finally, remember that AgentLink is a network run by its members for the benefit of the community, on whom it relies for feedback. If you have any comments or suggestions on the way ahead, email [email protected]. The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) was formed in 1996 as a non-profit organisation with the remit of producing software standards for heterogeneous and interacting agents and agent-based systems across multiple vendors' platforms. This is expressed more formally in FIPA's official mission statement: The promotion of technologies and interoperability specifications …