BPEL & Agents

The interest in using languages such as BPEL for longer running interactions certainly seems to be growing judging by stories like this one - Jim Clune at sys-con (linked from the SOA blog). This kind of interaction has been one of the goals of Agent technology research for a long time - example of these kind of long running interactions can be found in many places including the FIPA Agent specifications. Hopefully people in the research field can actually inform the development of things like BPEL for this purpose rather than have new wheel's invented.