Abstract
In FIPA-style multi-agent systems, agents coordinate their activities by sending messages representing particular communicative acts (or performatives). Agent communication languages must strike a balance between simplicity and expressiveness by defining a limited set of communicative act types that fit the communication needs of a wide set of problems. More complex requirements for particular problems must then be handled by defining domain-specific predicates and actions within ontologies. This paper examines the communication needs of a multi-agent distributed information retrieval system and discusses how well these are met by the FIPA ACL.