Of the various topics discussed at Dagstuhl last week, one was to look at the possibility of standards for CEP. The Dagstuhl event in 2007 apparently concluded that the event processing space was too new or immature to consider standards – 3 years on has anything changed?
Since 2007, the CEP market and acceptance has continued to grow, as has the understanding of how and where Complex Event Processing fits.
I was fortunate to be joined by Prof. Adrian Paschke from Free University of Berlin, and Florian Springer from business consultancy Senacor, in the “Standards Task” at Dagstuhl in 2010. Between us we defined a “framework” of the CEP system development process from which we could better understand the role and potential for both existing, extended and new standards.
This follows the OMG viewpoint (via Model Driven Architecture / MDA CIM, PIM and PSM levels representing Computer Independent, Platform Independent and Platform Specific Models) supported by Use Cases, Domain Reference Models, and associated Functional Models etc. As such, it is only one of many viewpoints – but a reasonable starting point nontheless.
The team reported to the Dagstuhl attendees a mapping of some of the available standards to this model. Others we missed (like “Benchmarking standards”). There was also interest in “Academic Standards” – which probably maps to a Reference Model for the terminology and practices in CEP that could be used for a common curriculum – effectively a special domain (education) reference model (for the CEP definitions in the framework).
One intriguing “standards gap” is that of the business definition of event patterns – the high level pattern language at the CIM-PSM boundary that defines complex event patterns. Earlier it was disclosed that although CEP vendors offer such pattern specification languages, some developers shun them for more detailed control of event processing (using queries, rules etc) – although it is likely these patterns are not yet defined at the “business model” level. Such a pattern language, incidentally, is also available in the recently announced TIBCO BusinessEvents 4.0.
