For the past few years I have been working on the development of agent
communication languages protocols.  These are intended to be
high-level languages and protocols to support the communication among
intelligent software agents.  This work has grown out of the
DARPA-sponsored Knowledge Sharing Effort (KSE) -- a distributed
research program which is developing a methodology and software tools
for coordination and knowledge sharing in intelligent information
systems or "agents".  This research focuses on the ability of such
agents to effectively interoperate by communicating information and
knowledge in spite of problems introduced by heterogeneity of
platforms, implementation technology, operating environments, and
development.  This communication requires a common language or
language framework which involves syntactic, semantic and pragmatic
components.

The KSE has developed KQML as a language and protocol for exchanging
information and knowledge which addresses the pragmatics level of the
communication.  It focuses on an extensible set of performatives,
which defines the permissible operations that agents may attempt on
each other's knowledge and goal stores.  The performatives comprise a
substrate on which to develop higher-level models of inter-agent
interaction such as contract nets and negotiation.  In addition, KQML
provides a basic architecture for knowledge sharing through a special
class of agents called communication facilitators which coordinate the
interactions of other agents The ideas which underlie the evolving
design of KQML are currently being explored through experimental
prototype systems which are being used to support several testbeds in
such areas as concurrent engineering, intelligent design and
intelligent planning and scheduling.

Our focus has been on supporting non-mobile agents but we realize that
mobile knowledge -- i.e., knowledge that is shared among non-mobile
agents -- has many of the properties of mobile-code.  A version of a
preliminary note on "Mobile knowledge as mobile code" is available at
<http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~finin/mobileknowledge/>.