Implementing agent communication languages directly from UML specifications

Abstract

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 an automatic mapping from high-level abstract specifications of language structures to specific computer language bindings that can be directly used by an agent platform. Some advantages of this approach are that it provides a framework for specifying and experimenting with alternative agent communication languages and reduces the error-prone manual process of generating compatible bindings and grammars for different syntaxes. A prototype implementation supporting an automatic conversion from an abstract communication language expressed in UML to a native Java API and a Resource Description Framework (RDF) serialisation format is described.