Barriers to Effective Agent Communication

Position Statement When agents communicate with each other, there needs to be some way to ensure that the meaning of what one agent 'says' is accurately conveyed to the other agent. There are two extremes, in principal, for handling this problem. The simplest (and perhaps the most common?) approach, it to ignore the problem altogether. That is, just assume that all agents are using the same terms to mean the same things. In practice, this will usually be an assumption built into the application. This only works, however, when one has full control over what agents exist, and what they might communicate. In reality, agents need to interact in a much wider world, where it will cannot be assumed that other agents will use the same terms, or if they do, it cannot be assumed that the terms will mean the same thing.