FIPA to become an IEEE standards committee
The Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents [1] (FIPA)
was established almost ten years ago to develop software
standards for heterogeneous and interacting agents and
agent-based systems. It successfully developed and
published a very good set of standards for agent
communication, interoperability and infrastructure. The
last several years has seen a gradual decline in paying
members, fewer technical people able to devote time and a
general loss of momentum.
This fall the FIPA board decided to close down FIPA as a
Swiss-based organization and find a sponsor to help maintain
and develop the FIPA standards. The membership voted to
follow this course and discussions were held with a number
of candidate organizations. The IEEE Computer Society
invited FIPA to become part of its family of standards
committees and working groups [2]. In March, the FIPA
membership voted to join as the "FIPA Standards Committee".
This committee will acting as a self-organizing body with
its own policies and procedures, dues structures, and bank
account within the IEEE. The IEEE Computer Society will
provide the umbrella organization, website maintenance,
voting support, and all the other benefits that a large
standards organization provides.
FIPA was an exciting experiment and perhaps a bit ahead of
its time. I think that joining IEEE's standards committee is
a good decision and am optimistic that this will provide a
new home for FIPA's ideas and standards to evolve as new
technologies appear and mature. The agents vision is still
the right one, IMHO, and FIPA's good work will be needed
soon.
[1] http://fipa.org/
[2] http://www.computer.org/standards/