Implementing agent communication languages directly from UML specifications

This paper proposes the use of the Unified Modeling Language as a formalism for defining the abstract syntax of agent communication languages and their associated content languages, with implementations for specific programming languages and message serialization formats generated automatically from these models. This eliminates the error-prone manual process of generating compatible language bindings and message encodings for different implementations of a language and, by decoupling these issues from the implementation of other agent code, provides a framework for specifying and experimenting with alternative agent communication languages. The approach is illustrated by an automatically generated application programmer interface in Java for processing strongly-typed messages and serializing them using RDF.

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