KQML

KQML (Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language) is an early agent communication language developed in the 1990s as part of the ARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort. It predates FIPA-ACL and influenced its design, but shares the same fundamental limitation: it assumes that agents can communicate meaningfully only after agreeing on a shared ontology and communication protocol.\n\nKQML defines a set of performatives (ask, tell, achieve, deny) that agents use to express the intended effect of a message. The language was influential in the academic multi-agent systems community but never achieved industrial adoption, largely because the open-world assumption — that agents would encounter other agents with unknown capabilities and ontologies — proved incompatible with KQML's closed-world protocol design.\n\nKQML's legacy is not in its technical specifications but in the research questions it raised: What does it mean for agents to share knowledge? Can communication protocols be learned rather than specified? These questions remain open and have become more urgent as large language models begin to operate as agents in open environments.\n\n