[1] It was developed in the early 1990s as part of the DARPA knowledge Sharing Effort, which was aimed at developing techniques for building large-scale knowledge bases which are share-able and re-usable.
While originally conceived of as an interface to knowledge based systems, it was soon repurposed as an Agent communication language.
[2][3] Work on KQML was led by Tim Finin of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Jay Weber of EITech and involved contributions from many researchers.
Higher-level interactions such as contract nets and negotiation are built using these.
KQML's "communication facilitators" coordinate the interactions of other agents to support knowledge sharing.