There are formal notions of agents possible, and
there are useful things agents people can do in e-commerce

• Refrain from trying to promote agent frameworks to hackers in industry trying to get out the next version of a consensus standard.
• Get involved with the consensus standards.
• Evaluate the new languages and formats from the standpoint of ASOE.
• Evaluate the new languages and formats from the standpoint of useful exception messages within applications.
• Use experience in building agent platforms to help tackle the hard engineering/research problems:
  • Security, trust, and authority
  • Service description and location
  • Service composition
  • Process merging
  • Hierarchical routing

• Tackle the hard knowledge-based research issues:
  • Formalization if useful
  • Emergent behavior control
  • Ontologies for semantic unification with minimal prior agreement
  • New agents that can figure out how to play when plugged in
  • How to model other agents and users in order to yield better functionality
  • Reasoning about inexact answers and volunteering information
  • Distributed debugging