ECMA-431 1st Edition / December 2025
Binding of the Natural Language Interaction Protocol (NLIP) over HTTP/HTTPS
Reference number ECMA-123:2009
© Ecma International 2009
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© Ecma International 2025
Contents
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Scope ...................................................................................................................................................... 1
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Conformance ......................................................................................................................................... 1
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Normative references ............................................................................................................................ 1
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Terms and definitions ........................................................................................................................... 1
5
Notational conventions ......................................................................................................................... 2
6 6.1
NLIP end point ....................................................................................................................................... 2 Optional end points ............................................................................................................................... 2
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Introduction The technology of Artificial Intelligence has the potential to be truly transformative to society. Despite some limitations, the technology is capable of many functions, including but not limited to answering questions, translating, describing and summarizing multi-modal content, generating new content, and summarizing large volumes of information. This enables the creation of intelligent agents that can use AI to analyze data and provide new services. A much bigger boost to the social benefits of AI technology can be obtained by interactions among different intelligent agents, which may be under the control of different organizations and users. The interaction among intelligent agents can unlock new economic and social value, just like the interactions among various Internetbased services was enabled with the advent of the web browser. There is a need for a standard common protocol that is used by humans to interact with an intelligent agent, and for intelligent agents to interact with each other. ECMA-430 specification proposes such a protocol, the Natural Language Interaction Protocol (NLIP). This Standard describes the binding of NLIP protocol to a base transfer protocol which is using HTTP/HTTPS.
This Ecma Standard was developed by Technical Committee 56 and was adopted by the General Assembly of December 2025.
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Binding of the Natural Language Interaction Protocol (NLIP) over HTTP/HTTPS
1
Scope
This Standard defines how the Natural Language Interaction Protocol (NLIP) should be implemented over the base transfer protocol of HTTP or HTTPS. The exemplar use-cases for NLIP implementation over HTTP or HTTPS are out of scope of this Standard.
2
Conformance
A conforming implementation must provide and support all types of messages and submessage along with the semantics defined in the NLIP specification draft, and support them over HTTP or HTTPS. A conforming production deployment of NLIP must select a security profile defined in ECMA-434 and support it.
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Normative references
The following documents are referred to in the text in such a way that some or all of their content constitutes requirements of this document. For dated references, only the edition cited applies. For undated references, the latest edition of the referenced document (including any amendments) applies. ECMA-430, Natural Language Interaction Protocol (NLIP) ECMA-434, Security Profiles for the Natural Language Interaction Protocol (NLIP) IETF RFC 2119, Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc2119] IETF RFC 7230, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Message Syntax and Routing [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc7230/] IETF RFC 7240, Prefer Header for HTTP [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc7240/] IETF RFC 9113, HTTP/2 [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9113/ IETF RFC 9114, HTTP/3 [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9113/]
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Terms and definitions
For the purposes of this document, the following terms and definitions apply. 4.1 NLIP NLIP or Natural Language Interaction Protocol is the protocol defined in ECMA-430.
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4.2 base transfer protocol a base transfer protocol is a communication protocol between two computer systems which supports an encrypted and authenticated transfer of data across those computer systems. In this specification, the base transfer protocol is http/https.
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Notational conventions
In this Standard, the following conventions that are consistent with IETF RFC 2119 are used: •
“Shall” indicates that the item is an absolute requirement of the specification
•
“Should” indicates that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
•
“May” indicates that that an item is truly optional. One vendor may choose to include the item because a particular marketplace requires it or because the vendor feels that it enhances the product while another vendor may omit the same item. An implementation which does not include a particular option shall be prepared to interoperate with another implementation which does include the option, though perhaps with reduced functionality. In the same vein an implementation which does include a particular option shall be prepared to interoperate with another implementation which does not include the option (except, of course, for the feature the option provides.)
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NLIP end point
A conformant implementation of NLIP over HTTP/HTTPS will have the server end-point running on a TCP Server Port. This end-point would be accessible using a URL defined as https://<server_name>:port/nlip. The end-point shall support accepting an NLIP message using the POST command of HTTP. The end-point should use either HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2 as the base transfer protocol, Implementations may use HTTP/3 in validated use cases.
6.1
Optional end points
A NLIP end point may also provide an alternate end-point for upload of large binary data. This upload will be provided at any port different than the port used by NLIP end point. The protocol and extension can be provided by an NLIP end point to its peer using a control message with structured format.
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© Ecma International 2025
© Ecma International 2025