On EPTS working groups

Towards the year 2009, EPTS will increase its activities. Currently six working groups has been approved by a series of meetings of the EPTS steering committee extended with all the people who proposed working groups. We are going to issue soon a call for -- comments, vote and participation for the EPTS community.

First - something about the process of EPTS work. The main work will be done in working groups, the steering committee serves as a facilitator, but each working group has two co-leaders (as the proposals go now), and help the proposers devise the charter, make sure it makes sense, and meet the legal requirements (one of the properties of making EPTS as a formal organization is that there are some legal agreements between the members that need to be kept). The sec0nd phase which we are now entering is -- putting the working groups proposals in the EPTS site, in a members only section of the site, for comments, vote, and call for participation - each organizational and individual member can participate in any working group they are interested in. However, participation also means commitment for active participation. We shall hold a members' call to present all the proposals, and then the members will vote. Each negative vote will have to be augmented, and the proposal leader will answer - both objections and answers will be made public. After the members' vote, there will be final discussion in the steering committee, especially for a working groups that had objections, and final decision will be made.
The idea is to finish all this process in early January and launch the working groups for 2009.
EPTS members will get further instructions; the participation in the working group is restricted to EPTS members only, for legal reasons; however, everybody can become EPTS member (organizational member or individual member - see instructions in the EPTS website.

The six working groups that will be presented are:

(1). Glossary: We have issued version 1.1 of the glossary, but the work has not ended; this is a living document and a moving target, as the event processing area is in a relatively young age as a discipline. An agreed upon glossary is important to have common language, and has been successfully done in other disciplines.

(2). Use Cases: This working group continues from 2008 and had devised a template for the analysis of use cases, the idea is to survey a significant amount of use cases in order to classify event processing applications.

(3). Meta-modelling: OMG has issue RFPs for meta-modeling standards that have relations to event processing, in specific: Event Metamodel and Agent Metamodeland Profile.
EPTS still needs to determine about its status of engagement with OMG, according to it this can be either official response to the RFP, or input to OMG. In any event, EPTS has been recognized by OMG (and referenced in the RFP itself), and was asked to provide input. The working group will attempt to provide unified response of the EPTS community. Note that this is the pattern we are pursuing in general - EPTS will not become a standard development organization, but will assist existing organizations to develop EP related standards.

(4). Reference Architecture: In the early days of the pre-EPTS, there has been some work to collect and compare reference architectures of various vendors. We are now returning to deal with refernce architectures, this time in the form of an EPTS Working Group. This working group will propose one or more reference architectures for various cases (consistent with the evolving classification in the use cases workgroup and the evolving glossary).

(5). Interoperability Analysis: This working group will engage in study of requirements and mechanisms for interoperability - both between event processing products of various vendors, and between event processing products and various producer and consumers of event processing.
After the study, the working group will recommend to the EPTS community about next phases
(e.g. creation of additional standards, revision of current standards etc...).

(6). Languages Analysis: This working group will engage in study of existing event processing languages (both from products and from the literature) to devise (in a semantic level) a set of functions that is being used. After the study, the working group will recommend to the EPTS community about next phases (e.g. creation of a single language standard or creation of N variations for various languages or creation of a meta-lanaguage standard...).

I am personally will co-chair the languages analysis one (an area that I spent a lot of time on recently), and will follow, all others.

More working groups may be launched, however, I surveyed only those approved so far to continue to the next phase.

I believe that at the end of 2009 with the results of these working groups report, we'll advance the understanding of the event processing discipline, and will have a clear road-map for related standards...

Enough for now -- more later.