UCL—Universal Communication Language

For successful cooperation to occur between agents they have to be able to communicate among themselves. To enable this communi- cation an Agent Communication Language (ACL) is required. Messages coded in an ACL should adequately express their meaning from a seman- tic point of view. The Universal Communication Language (UCL) can fulfill the role of an ACL and, at the same time, be convertible to and from a natural language. UCL design is concerned with the description of message structures, their underlining semantic context and the support for protocols for agent interaction. The key point about UCL is that the language can be used not only for communication among software agents but among humans too. This is possible because UCL is derived from the Universal Network Language (UNL), a language created to allow com- munication among people using different languages. UCL was defined using the Extended Markup Language (XML) to make it easier to inte- grate into the Internet. In addition, an enconverter-deconverter software prototype was written to serve as a tool for testing and experimenting with the language specifications.