Glossary
- A2A (Agent2Agent protocol)
- An open protocol, now under the Linux Foundation, for agents on different frameworks to discover and talk to each other. v1.0.0 shipped March 12, 2026; v1.0.1 (May 28, 2026) is the latest release. Read more
- Agent card
- A2A's machine-readable description of an agent's capabilities and endpoint, used for discovery. Read more
- Agentic mesh
- A layer that connects agents across frameworks so they can communicate and collaborate. BAND uses the term for layer 1 of its platform; other vendors apply it to event brokers or gateways. Read more
- Blackboard
- A shared knowledge base agents post to and read from before acting. Read more
- Choreography
- Coordination with no central controller; agents react to events and to each other. Read more
- Collaboration layer
- Shared infrastructure where agents from any framework and humans work in rooms with addressed messages and shared context. Read more
- Exactly-once processing
- A guarantee that each message is processed by an agent one time, even across retries and crashes. Read more
- Handoff
- One agent transferring control of a task to another. Read more
- Human-in-the-loop
- People inspecting, approving or overriding agent work during a task, not only after it. Read more
- Loop prevention
- Guards (hop limits, mandatory addressing, per-room limits, idempotency) that stop agents triggering each other endlessly. Read more
- MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- An open standard for connecting AI applications to tools and data; “like a USB-C port for AI applications.” Agent-to-tool, where A2A is agent-to-agent. Read more
- @mention routing
- Delivering a message only to the participants it addresses, so the right agent acts and others stay quiet. Read more
- Orchestrator
- A central component, usually a lead agent or workflow graph, that decides which agent runs next and merges results. Read more
- Supervisor agent
- The lead agent in the orchestrator pattern; plans, delegates and decides when work is done. Read more
What do people ask about these terms?
MCP connects agents to tools and data; A2A connects agents to other agents. BAND supports both.