Derivation of Glue Code for Agent Interoperation

Getting agents to communicate requires translating the data structures of the sender (the source representation) to the format required by the receiver (the target representation). Assuming that there is a formal theory of the semantics of the two formats, which explains both their meanings in terms of a neutral topic domain, we can cast the translation problem as solving higher-order functional equations. Some simple rules and strategies apparently suffice to solve these equations automatically. The strategies may be summarized as: decompose complex expressions, replacing topic-domain expressions with source-domain expressions when necessary. A crucial issue is getting the required formal theories of the source and target domains. We believe it is sufficient to find partial formalizations that grow as necessary.