… was the title of the Business Rules Forum session presented earlier this month, targeting the Business Analysts attending the BBC2011 conference. This includes a quick overview of (some) of the various ways to model events (in business models), including using the EPTS Reference Architecture as a guide to event operations required or events desired. Sandy Kemsley did a great overview on her blog, by the way (and Sandy also covers event modelling in her tutorials and training).

Feedback welcome, and of course I’ll be adding things like VPEC-T to version 2 of this.

TIBCO, Oracle, IBM and F.U.Berlin presented the latest tutorial from the EPTS Reference Architecture Group today at the ACM Distributed Event Based Systems Conference being held at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Labs. This covered the current work of the EPTS Reference Architecture group on defining (and refining) common event processing design patterns like “filter”, “enrich” and “route”.

This tutorial proved interesting to prepare: we discussed patterns in terms of the different event processing technologies of the presenters: rules-oriented event processing (TIBCO BusinessEvents, IBM Websphere Decision Server Business Events component, and Prova) and stream-oriented event processing (Oracle CEP, and IBM Infosphere Streams). In future patterns work we’ll try and expand this list (as well as the patterns covered), for example to include the TIBCO BusinessEvents Query Language, Pattern Framework, and State Model, and maybe TIBCO Hawk rules.Watch this space!

Congratulations to Opher Etzion for a comprehensive EPTS Virtual Symposium which was co-hosted with OMG this week. Opher reported 77 virtual attendees, and will be posting the slides up on the EPTS site over the coming days.

The next “EPTS get-together” is likely to be the DEBS conference in July.

Thanks to EPTS Chair Opher Etzion for reminding us that the EPTS’ Symposium for 2011 has been announced to take place at the OMG Technical Meeting in Washington DC on 24 March 2011 via the OMG Event Processing Community Of Practice.

Agenda is here.

Booking details will be linked from here.

Conveniently, this is the day after the co-located Decision Modelling Information Day - which will include an overview of TIBCO BusinessEvents Decision Manager and other decision management technologies -  in case anyone needs an excuse to attend… See you there!

Thanks to Prof. Pedro Bizarro (University of Coimbra, Portugal) and Christoph Emmersberger (Senacor Technologies, Germany) for the announcement that the new Event Processing Technical Society “use case survey” is now up and running. EPTS wants to collect information on use cases to …

1. Classify scenarios to guide selecting an appropriate event processing technology
2. Inspire others with similar requirements on how to use event processing technology in their applications
3. Provide researchers and engineers information about how to improve the technology

The surveys asks questions on the following topics in case you need to prepare an answer: industry, functional area, deployment status, business drivers, effort cost, reference URLs (if available), event channels and data sources used for input and output, target dissemination characteristics, features and models used, performance characteristics, performance growth rates expected, enterprise characteristics (such as “high availability”), deployment constraints, and hurdles or areas for improvement.

Although the EPTS cancelled its symposium this year, the timing for this survey will hopefully mean that the EPTS Use Case Working Group will have some results in time for the next (March 2011) planned meeting. Meanwhile, project managers and team leads for CEP projects are recommended to complete the survey using whatever anonymity they want.