The role and prospects of standards in event processing

Still in Orlando, we have finished the EPTS meeting yesterday, and I'll summarize it within the next few days, staying for the Gartner Event Processing summit. The fact that Gartner made a commercial conference indicates that the level of interest in event processing has crossed a meaningfull threshold. In order to participate in the Gartner meeting, I also have an IBM "booth duty", which requires me to dress in a way that I am not accoustomed to (disguised as a civilized business person) -- somebody told me to put a picture on the blog of how I am looked, since in reality, there is a rare event, so you have low probability to see me this way, so this is the picture you see on the top. Anyway, one of the topics that have been mentioned in the Gartner meeting by Roy Schulte is that SOA became a reality only after web services standards started to be pervasive, and advocated for standards as a major enabler (and lack of standards as a major obstacle). We had long discussions in the EPTS meeting about standards, it seems that there is an agreement to advance towards standars, but with some caution. First, some people were not sure that our understanding of event processing is mature enough for standards (this is IMHO also true for the SQL extension proposal that is going on, I have some doubts about the maturity of their thinking)... On the other hand, we need to show the customers that we are working towards standards, and try to make the thinking more mature (more on when I'll summarize the EPTS meeting), anyway -- we can classify the standards to three main groups.

(1). Modelling standards.

(2). Interoperability standards.

(3). Language standards.

OMG is about to issue RFP for modelling standards, and I guess that we'll deal a lot in this issue over the next year, on the language standard -- I have already discussed the idea of meta-language first, and it seems to get some momentum, interoperability standards are more difficult since there are a lot of related standards both on event structures and on event transport, and we'll probably defer this discussion for later.

Is there a way to accelerate the process of getting to standards ? -- probably yes, but it requires level of investment from the community, much higher than invested so far --- and this is the challenge we'll have to deal with --- more later.