FIPA-ACL

FIPA-ACL (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents — Agent Communication Language) is a standardized language for agent communication developed in the late 1990s. It specifies message formats, performatives (inform, request, propose), and semantics grounded in modal logics of belief and intention.\n\nFIPA-ACL was designed for closed systems with shared ontologies. Its failure to achieve widespread adoption in open multi-agent systems reveals a fundamental design error: it assumed that communication could be separated from ontology, and that semantics could be specified in advance of use. The Semantic Web made the same error, and for the same reason.\n\nThe language remains historically significant as the first serious attempt to formalize agent communication, but its limitations — closed-world assumption, rigid performative set, and lack of learning mechanisms — have made it a cautionary example rather than a living standard.\n\n