On the EPTS Language Analysis Working Group

Yesterday we kicked-off the "languages analysis working group" of EPTS. The EPTS members have been part of the approval process, and a result of a going on brainstorming in the community that started in the event processing symposium in September 2008, we are kicking off six working-groups: glossary, interoperability analysis, meta-modeling, reference architectures, use cases and languages analysis. These working groups will be the main activity of EPTS in the year 2009, and will hopefully result in better understanding of the area, and better understanding of the potential standard play. In the working group we have around dozen people from the vendor, academic and customer community. I have decided to concentrate my own technical contribution to EPTS (besides the substantial time I invest in facilitating the overall activities) in the language analysis area - since this is the closest to my interest area. My partner in moderating this working group is Dr. Jon Riecke, an experienced programming language researcher, who works for Aleri. It is a challenge to have a diversified team with various opinions, which is a symptom of the challenge to achieve an event processing language standard somewhere in the future.

What is this working group chartered to do ? we have committed on two deliverables, the first

The first one is -- [the exact terminology is still under discussion] --- a [semantic model] that abstracts out the functions (and may be non-functional annotation) of event processing languages, without getting to the question of programming style (SQL or not SQL). We shall look at existing commercial languages as well as languages that have been developed in the research community and try to abstract out, another source will be a feedback from the use cases working group that works in parallel that will attempt to discover more requirements from the use cases analysis.

The second one is discussion and recommendation (possibly with alternatives) about the road- map to standards in the event processing languages area (can we aspire to one standard or multiple standards ? maybe a standard in the semantic "meta" level only, or we may determine to table the issue of standards for a certain period), frankly, I don't have a clue what the conclusion here will be.


We'll submit a tutorial proposal for DEBS 2009, if accepted - we shall present an interim report of the work in July.

I'll report about it as we'll progress.