The Babylon tower and event formats

Still in the USA, after the OMG meeting in the Washington DC area, I got to the Boston area, and now I am in Burlington, MA, visiting the (former) Aptsoft guys. When driving abroad I am renting a car with GPS (see above to determine which one), and it typically gets me to where I want - however, it is still not totally reliable, in the last day it confused me twice, one yesterday night to find the hotel, it told me to turn left, and meant in the next turn, not in the current turn, but it did not say so, thus, I found myself back on the I95, and had to turn around at the next exit, and try again. Today it sent me to some shopping center instead of the Aptsoft site, and after I ignored it and found it - the local people told me that the GPS maps have the numbers of the street in the wrong directions (starting from the other end) - well, sometimes the technology is fine, and the weakest link is the data it uses.

Talking about data, one of the topics that were discussed in the OMG meeting about standards is the topic of -- semantic/structural standards for events. I have used the term "Babylon tower" in one of the earliest postings in this Blog and meant that we have Babylon tower of languages - like the original tower who separated the languages. However, there is another Babylon tower that relates to event format - syntax and semantics, and here the problem is even harder, since there are multiple formats in multiple domains, nobody even made an inventory survey. One of the presenters said (and it is true in some cases) that 80 percent of the cost of building EP application is to set up the events from the sources and transform them to a processable format by composing adapters (hand coded, or by using transformation engines). This is some of the domains that need more investigation, and perhaps we need a meta-data standard here.