Focus Area: Application programming interfaces, protocol surfaces, and machine-readable service contracts that let autonomous agents discover capabilities, exchange requests, and coordinate actions across systems.
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.
15
Technical Terms
75%+
Tier-1 Sources
V1.72
Pipeline Version
Technical Glossary
AGT001Capability Discovery Contract
A Capability Discovery Contract is the machine-readable description that tells an agent what another service can do, how to call it, and what constraints apply. It reduces guesswork by making service affordances explicit before invocation.
An Affordance Descriptor is the structured description of an action, property, or event surface that an agent can use. It frames APIs as available behaviors rather than as raw endpoints alone.
An Intent-Bound Endpoint is an API endpoint whose meaning is tied to a well-scoped action rather than vague generic access. That makes orchestration safer because agents can reason about purpose, expected input, and allowable outcomes.
A Negotiated Action Schema is the shared structure by which two agents settle the parameters of a task before execution. It lets autonomous systems agree on payload meaning, optionality, and result expectations instead of assuming silent compatibility.
A Task Callback Channel is the return path through which an agent receives completion updates, intermediate events, or deferred results after the initial request. It matters when actions outlive a single synchronous HTTP exchange.
State-Aware Idempotency is the property that repeated agent calls can be recognized and handled safely without duplicating side effects. In multi-agent workflows, this protects against retries creating accidental extra work or conflicting state changes.
A Proof-Bound API Call is an invocation that cryptographically ties the request to the caller and often to the exact message contents. This prevents the API surface from treating bearer access alone as enough for high-trust actions.
A Delegated Execution Scope is the bounded permission space an agent receives when acting for another principal or workflow. Good agent APIs expose this scope clearly so downstream tools can enforce least privilege.
A Machine Negotiation Envelope is the structured message wrapper that carries proposals, counters, acceptance signals, and execution metadata between agents. It gives negotiation a durable syntax instead of leaving it buried in ad hoc prompts.
A Tool Authorization Grant is the authorization artifact that lets an agent invoke a downstream tool under controlled conditions. It should expose issuer, audience, time bounds, and action scope so the tool can verify why the call is allowed.
Service Manifest Normalization is the process of expressing diverse API surfaces in a consistent machine-readable format so agents can compare and consume them. This is what turns many unrelated services into a navigable tool layer.
An Evented Response Contract defines how an API publishes state changes or partial outputs over time instead of returning one final answer. Agents rely on this when orchestration involves monitoring, subscription, or progressive execution.
A Policy Decision Hook is the point in an API flow where a call can be checked against external policy logic before execution or release of results. It allows dynamic control without hardcoding every rule inside each service.
A Failure-Reason Surface is the structured part of an API that explains why a call was rejected, deferred, or partially completed. Agents need machine-readable failure semantics so they can recover intelligently instead of looping blindly.
An Agent Invocation Profile is the agreed runtime profile that specifies how an agent should authenticate, sign, throttle, and format requests for a given API surface. It converts general compatibility into operational interoperability.