One of the sessions at the EPTS VS was James Odell and Manfred Koethe presenting on the Event Metamodel and Profile RFP. I was surprised to see they already have some large vendors signed up for this. So why consider an “event standard”? What is wrong with say the TIBCO BusinessEvents idea that extends the idea of UML Class to build hierarchies of events, which in addition to properties and payloads have metadata like “TimeToLive” and datetimestamps?

1. There *is* a need for cross-enterprise understanding of events …  including derived, complex events, used across business and IT processes. So a common event spec should help here.

2. The requirement for such a standard is especially noticable when pushed up into the business domain (i.e. what are my business events?). Potentially this raises the bar for the vocabulary for event understanding to ontologies like OWL/ODM and SBVR, and associated modelling tools…

3. But what about the details of “complex events”? How can event relations etc be a part of this standard without treading on the toes of potential query versus rule language semantic issues? There is an easy answer to this (as I mentioned in the EPTS Virtual Symposium). We’ll see if the rest of the community agrees.

The “letter of intent” deadline to join the work on this specification is 20th May this year.

Thanks to TIBCO’s Scott Vorthmann for updating me on the SCA-Assembly-Extensions-for-Event-Processing-and-Pub/Sub draft, which was reported on InfoQ a few months ago. This seems to be mostly an Oracle + IBM effort, and seemingly is occuring outside of OASIS, which seems strange if it is true.

• There is some interesting commentary on its relevence versus the WS-Eventing / -Notification efforts. Possibly all these are together in the same logjam. Some of the associated comments seem to make the case that there is a difference between message processing and event processing - even if most CEP tools utilise messaging systems as transports for events, the appearance of a message *is* an event, etc….
• This SCA effort seems to have similarities with the OMG Event Metamodel and Profile initiative - indeed “SCA-AE4EP&PS” would likely be an input to EMP (if either take off).
• Work seems to be progressing on an initial implementation anyway as a part of the Apache Tuscany project - they have a page on event processing too - but one gets the impression the differences between services, components, and event processing components might be a problem here.