Personal Opinion:

Greetings:

I just caught the tail of this thread, my apologies for not reading the whole thread, attachments and links as yet; great to see activity in this area...

IMHO (having done some work in this area), JXTA provides an excellent foundation for distributed, intelligent, mobile, multi-agent systems (also an instance of SOA). There is nothing preventing an agent system architecture/design/implementation from supporting/integrating both FIPA agent standards and OASIS standards. I'd also add W3C, especially the Semantic Web efforts namely OWL/RDF. (FIPA info, http://www.fipa.org/ ;FIPA is now an IEEE Standards Committee, see: http://www.fipa.org/about/fipa_and_ieee.html)

If you haven't already done so, it is worth a look at CMU's RETSINA and Semantic Web efforts which c/should also be of interest (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~softagents/index.html), though I don't know the licensing requirements, if any. There are too many other good agent efforts to list, as someone previously mentioned, though there are agent standards such as FIPA.

While there may be overlap among the many specs, these are minimal and can be normalized given sufficient interest (and wheel reinvention avoidance). Consider FIPA-compliant agents which also support OASIS / Web service standards and common bindings (SOAP/WSDL/UDDI/ebXML-RR/ etc.) and W3C standards (*ML, Semantic Web, etc.) deployed over a FIPA/JXTA agent ecosystem.

Agents as Web services and vice versa, not an original thought perhaps but also not a common thought. Perhaps these specs/standards may converge and synthesize eventually, however at present they are often complimentary...e.g., compare/contrast BPEL/BPM/Choreography/Ontology/UBL/etc with FIPA Agent Communications (Contract Net Interaction Protocol), Agent Management, Ontology, ACL, etc.

For me, the great thing about all of this is that JXTA, FIPA, OASIS, W3C are open, implementation, language, platform, network neutral standards and/or specifications. There are commercial and open source implementations for various elements too. Finally, while not trivial it is possible to integrate and synthesize these many specs and standards (even implementations) to achieve what "I think" you are looking for...

..and at the top of my soapbox list co-equal with agent systems...AI,. but I'll spare you my pro-AI rants & raves as this isn't the appropriate forum ;)