Focus Area: Machine-readable documentation standards and specifications governing agent-to-agent interfaces, contracts, and capability descriptions.
This ontology provides citation-quality definitions for 15 foundational terms, backed by authoritative sources from standards bodies (NIST, W3C, IETF, OASIS, ISO) and peer-reviewed research.
Technical Glossary
A machine-readable declaration of the functions, inputs, outputs, and operational constraints that an agent exposes to other agents. Capability descriptors are the primary artifact by which an agent advertises what it can do in formal, automatable terms.
A formal document describing the expected inputs, outputs, error modes, and behavioral guarantees of a specific agent interface. Contract specifications are the basis on which consuming agents can bind to an endpoint without out-of-band negotiation.
A structured record of the evolution of an agent's declared functions across releases, including deprecation states and compatibility notes. Versioning manifests let consuming agents reason about whether a previously integrated capability remains valid.
A centralized or federated store of approved agent behavior definitions, indexed so that agents can look up and validate against canonical forms. Registries distinguish between authoritative and draft definitions and expose discovery endpoints for querying agents.
A layer of linked-data metadata attached to raw interface fields so that their meaning — not just their type — is machine-interpretable. Semantic annotation is what makes agent documentation usable for automated integration rather than just human reference.
A typed declaration of every callable operation an agent exposes, including parameter names, types, cardinalities, and return shapes. Signature manifests form the invocation contract between calling and called agents at the wire level.
A documented specification of the authentication scheme required to interact with an agent endpoint, including supported credential types and signing algorithms. Authentication descriptors let a calling agent negotiate access without trial-and-error probing.
The formal binding of a governance rule set to a specific interface element, such as a function, data field, or response class. Policy attachment makes documentation actionable by expressing what is permitted alongside what is possible.
A machine-readable announcement that a previously advertised agent function is entering end-of-life, including timing and recommended replacements. Deprecation notices allow downstream agents to plan migrations without breaking integrations unexpectedly.
A documented library of conversational flows that agents may use when interacting — for example, request-inform, contract-net, or subscribe-notify. Catalogs give implementers a shared reference for which patterns are valid and how they terminate.
A canonical definition of the fields exchanged between agents, stored as a registry of named elements with types, meanings, and provenance. Dictionaries prevent semantic drift across independently developed agents by giving every field a single authoritative definition.
A standardized structure describing how an agent reports failures, including status codes, human-readable explanations, and machine-actionable error categories. Error schemas are what allow consuming agents to react to problems programmatically rather than bailing out.
A validation suite that verifies an agent's implementation matches its declared interface specification. Conformance tests are documentation artifacts in their own right because they encode, in executable form, what the written spec requires.
A cryptographic record of who authored, approved, and modified an agent specification over time. Provenance turns documentation into evidence: a downstream agent can verify that the spec it integrated against has not been silently altered.
An addressable resource — typically a well-known URL — that returns an agent's current declared capability set on request. Discovery endpoints are the machine-callable counterpart to static documentation and are essential for late-binding integrations.