One of the main purposes of the EPTS Symposium was to report the progress of the various EPTS Working Groups. These included:
- Use Cases: EPTS is increasing the range of use cases, and considering classifications to cover in-production and theoretical cases – presenteded use cases included enterprise IT management and using social media stream analysis for marketing support, respectively. The chair’s grand challenges included exploitng the vast knowledge of the “Management of Data” domain (which some could view as avoiding “re-inventing the wheel”, others as following the same old practices that lead to problematic IT performance), as well as EPTS communications (such as public blog critiques instead of internal communications – no idea what that is about) especially between working groups.
- Reference Architecture: vendors including TIBCO, IBM, Oracle and Streambase presented as well as the host University of Trento. The participant architectures provoked some good Q&A and ideas (for the WG and future blogging!). We stole exploited the Use Case WG example on Healthcare to demonstrate the applicability of the architectures, but there is still work to be done on combining the ideas into a useful form.
- Glossary: the chairs of the Glossary WG were not in Trento but joined by phone. There were some revisions to the glossary under discussion, and it seems the discussion is finally exploiting the EPTS wiki (hoorah for Web 1.5-based collaboration!).
- Languages: Opher gave an update on the work of the Languages WG, which seems to be at a crossroads: metalanguage or EP language classifications? The WG presentation ended with a long discussion on standards – need, role, level etc. (My 2c contribution was that EPTS needs to avoid developing standalone new standards and should concentrate on supporting updates to existing standards for event handling, both at the domain (e.g. supply chain) and IT (e.g. W3C RIF) levels. And maybe push the Java Community Process (like being done for constraint programming) to compete with MSSI…
