This paper provides an overview of the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) standardisation effort in the area of specifying standards for heterogeneous, interoperating agent-based systems. JONATHAN DALE and EBRAHIM MAMDANI describe the types of software agents which are of interest to FIPA, the methods by which FIPA members collaborate and produce specifications and also descriptions of the specifications that FIPA has produced. They also list the available implementations of FIPA specifications and applications that use these implementations, as well as the current and future work of FIPA. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley& Sons, Ltd.