OMG CEP Standards event: what standards?

By
Paul Vincent
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Reading Time: 2 minutes

I am pleased to report that no blood was spilled in the latest vendor get-together at the OMG Washington meeting [*1].

Some of the interesting comments from the presentations were:

  • “80% of [implementation] work is new event sources” – clearly this may be true for custom event feeds, but otherwise, subject to satisfactory performance, use of an off-the-shelf ESB + adapters clearly makes sense
  • Big standardization need is for event semantics and standard formats: this is an argument for Domain Specific Languages (or rather, Domain Specific Events)
    .

So the interesting standards discussed were, in order of importance / relevance to CEP:

  • OMG Event Metamodel and Profile (EMP): still pre-RFP, with the challenges of bad timing with the BPMN/BPDM 2 debate, multiple UML definitions of event in existance, and the fact that CEP involves continuous event behavior.
  • OMG Production Rule Representation (PRR) and W3C RIF: in finalization, with good progress made at the PRR Face2face earlier in the week. Current PRR semantics do not cover continuous quey languages, though, which are used by many other CEP vendors; possibly it could do in future.
  • OMG Data-Distribution Service (DDS): OK this had 2 presentations (not sure why), from 2 vendors. Not being a middleware guy, I had not paid much attention to DDS before, but it doesn’t seem that any of the big vendors support it (which could explain why the DDS guys got upset when I mentioned JMS as a “middleware standard”). Generally pub-sub is a good idea, but I’ll leave the discussion on middleware options such as JMS/EMS and RV versus DDS to others…
    .

Thanks to Robert Marcus, NCOIC and Charlotte Wales, MITRE, for organizing this event.

Notes:

[1] An interesting metric for this event was the number of vendor marketing slides (or talk) per presentation: one was near 100% (a real turn-off for attendees), yet others were <5% (so full marks to TIBCO, Rhysome, RTI and PrismTech). [OK, we shouldn’t vote for ourselves – judge for yourself with the TIBCO rule standards presentation: Role of Rules and Stds in CEP].

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