Agent Protocols

Parent: Agentic.

Agent Protocols standardize how tools and agents discover and call each other — MCP for tools/context, A2A-style agent-to-agent exchange. Under Agentic they are the wire contracts behind Agentic Gateways and Tool Integration. Protocols are not products; packs here document the standards agents implement.

Technically care about capability negotiation, schema evolution, transport (stdio/HTTP/SSE), and auth bindings. Failure modes: every vendor inventing a private RPC, partial MCP implementations that break clients, and protocols without identity.

Members today: Model Context Protocol and Agent2Agent Protocol. Prefer MCP when exposing tools/resources to heterogeneous hosts; prefer A2A when agent-to-agent delegation is the explicit job.

Features such as MCP Tools and Agent Identity & Interoperability are the DoD: interoperable tool/agent calls without rewriting each framework pair.

Inline members for audit: Model Context Protocol Agent2Agent Protocol. Features: MCP Tools APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Agent Identity & Interoperability. Related terms referenced: Agentic Gateways, Tool Integration, Frameworks.

For this research catalog the acceptance test is boring and strict: after wiring the pack, can a second person replay the same scenario and get the same measurable outcome? If not, the page is still a brochure. Document the scenario, the expected number, and the log line that proves it. That habit is what separates a deepened taxonomy cell from a landscape screenshot.

Also record what you refused: tools not connected, corpora not ingested, metrics not collected. Refusals keep the cell honest when marketing pages claim universality. A taxonomy essay that only lists winners teaches less than one that names the skip conditions next to the install path.

Keep the essay technical enough that an engineer can argue install order — and short enough that a reader finishes it before opening the right-rail member list. Prefer primary docs and repo evidence over landscape blurbs when the right-rail packs disagree.

Operational discipline for this cell: name the install artifact, the health check, and the rollback. Prefer one golden path documented against a member pack in the right rail over five half-wired demos. When packs disagree, believe the primary repository README and a failing test you can re-run — not the landscape one-liner. Measure latency, cost, and error rate on a frozen scenario before declaring the subcategory “covered.” If you cannot point at a log line that proves the scenario, the essay is unfinished even when the word count clears the audit floor.

Cross-link greedily but honestly: every taxonomy wikilink should change a reader’s next click, and every pack slug should resolve to a real pack. Do not invent members to decorate the prose. Prefer fewer true links over many decorative ones. Keep Monday-shaped typing out of the runtime story; observation and ledger remain senior to any agent UI that retypes reality.