The annual Information Days — known within the community as iD events — were the heartbeat of the Agentcities initiative. They were where a globally distributed, otherwise online community came together face to face to demonstrate live agent interactions, present working-group progress, award technical competitions, and chart the direction of the testbed. Each Information Day paired a technical conference with hands-on demonstrations, allowing participants to prove interoperability between platforms operated on different continents. More than networking events, the iD gatherings were milestones that documented the growth of the network and the maturing of FIPA standards in practice.
The Information Days
iD1 — Sendai, Japan
The first Agentcities Information Day was held in Sendai, Japan, co-located with a major international agents conference to draw the broadest possible technical audience. iD1 gathered the founding platforms of the network and the researchers who had drafted its earliest interoperability recommendations. The agenda set the direction for the testbed as a whole: agreeing on the shared services every node should expose, the directory and message-transport conventions platforms would honour, and the cadence of future gatherings. By anchoring the launch in Japan, the organizers signalled from the outset that Agentcities was a genuinely global endeavour rather than a European one, and Pacific Rim institutions left Sendai committed to connecting their own platforms to the emerging network.
iD2 — Vancouver, Canada
By the second Information Day in Vancouver, the network had grown substantially and the emphasis shifted from planning to proof. iD2 was dominated by live demonstrations of cross-platform agent interactions — agents discovering one another through directory services, negotiating over standardized interaction protocols, and composing services hosted by different organizations in real time. The North American setting broadened Pacific Rim and trans-Atlantic participation, bringing new universities and research labs into the fold. Discussions in Vancouver focused on the practical friction the testbed had surfaced: ontology alignment between independently developed services, robustness of message transport across the public internet, and the tooling needed to lower the barrier for new platforms to join.
iD3 — Barcelona, Spain (February 2003)
iD3 in Barcelona was the largest Agentcities gathering, drawing more than 250 attendees from across Europe, North America, and Asia. The event was hosted with civic prominence, with sessions and a ceremony held in the Sala de Crónicas, and the Agentcities Technology Competition prizes were awarded in a ceremony at Barcelona City Hall — public recognition for the most compelling demonstrations of interoperable agent services. iD3 also hosted the First International Workshop on Healthcare Applications of Intelligent Agents (7–8 February), reflecting the growing interest in applying the testbed to real domains such as patient scheduling and care coordination. Barcelona marked the network at its high-water mark, both in size and in the breadth of services it could demonstrate.
iD4 — Helsinki, Finland (August 2003)
The fourth Information Day, held in Helsinki in August 2003, established a northern European hub for the community and focused on consolidating the rapid growth of the preceding years. Rather than chasing new scale, iD4 took stock: technical working groups delivered detailed progress reports on architecture, ontologies, and web-services integration, and participants reviewed which interoperability recommendations had proven durable in deployment. The Helsinki meeting also began the strategic conversations that would shape the initiative's next phase, as the community considered how the lessons of the FIPA-based testbed might extend to the emerging worlds of Semantic Web Services and GRID computing.
New York openNet Forum Meeting (July 2004)
Held at the New Yorker Hotel and co-located with AAMAS 2004 at Columbia University, the New York openNet Forum Meeting carried the title "Open Research Testbeds for Agent, Web Services and Semantic Web Deployment." The framing signalled the initiative's evolution beyond its original FIPA-only scope: sessions explored the convergence of FIPA agent standards with GRID computing, OWL-based Semantic Web ontologies, and the emerging WSRF (Web Services Resource Framework). The openNet meeting was less a celebration of the existing testbed than a bridge toward a broader, sustainable research infrastructure capable of hosting the next generation of distributed, service-oriented systems.
The Legacy of These Gatherings
Taken together, the Information Days and the openNet Forum traced the full arc of the Agentcities initiative — from the optimistic launch at Sendai, through the demonstration-driven growth of Vancouver and the peak at Barcelona, to the consolidation at Helsinki and the forward-looking pivot in New York. They were the moments when an online community became a real one, when interoperability stopped being a specification and became a demonstrated fact across continents. The relationships forged at these events outlasted the testbed itself: many participants went on to shape standards bodies, academic research programmes, and the service-oriented and agent-based technologies that followed. For anyone studying the history of multi-agent systems, the iD series stands as a record of how an open, consensus-driven community can advance a hard technical agenda through nothing more than shared infrastructure and an annual reason to gather.