Thanks to TIBCO’s Scott Vorthmann for updating me on the SCA-Assembly-Extensions-for-Event-Processing-and-Pub/Sub draft, which was reported on InfoQ a few months ago. This seems to be mostly an Oracle + IBM effort, and seemingly is occuring outside of OASIS, which seems strange if it is true.

• There is some interesting commentary on its relevence versus the WS-Eventing / -Notification efforts. Possibly all these are together in the same logjam. Some of the associated comments seem to make the case that there is a difference between message processing and event processing - even if most CEP tools utilise messaging systems as transports for events, the appearance of a message *is* an event, etc….
• This SCA effort seems to have similarities with the OMG Event Metamodel and Profile initiative - indeed “SCA-AE4EP&PS” would likely be an input to EMP (if either take off).
• Work seems to be progressing on an initial implementation anyway as a part of the Apache Tuscany project - they have a page on event processing too - but one gets the impression the differences between services, components, and event processing components might be a problem here.

This week OMG’s Technical Meeting has had most buzz around the BPMN 2.0 submission (and congratulations to that team, for which TIBCO is a supporter). Some of the other stuff going on includes:

• PRR or Production Rules Representation (which, for complex event processing like in TIBCO BusinessEvents, can include event-condition-action rules using standard forward-chaining semantics) starts the Revision Task Force process for PRR1.1. A few tweaks are due, but more interesting was to see 2 more vendors attend the PRR session this week. Also, note that UML tool NoMagic is presenting on PRR at ORF’09 later in the year…
• DMN or Decision Model and Notation started on its first stage of development, which is the identification of use cases and roles for defining UML-based decisions for a future RFP. We had some good discussions (which I’ll report in a future post once I have reported to the DMN community), and it is clear that this could be a very key standard for business modelers, end-users and tool vendors. Of course the relevance of this to event processing is that many CEP/EP systems’ role is to support decisions…

A somewhat hotter debate continues (/is) regarding the proposed Case Management RFP, which was developed from a Dynamic Business Activity Modeling RFI last year (which TIBCO responded to, and was also covered by our session at the recent Semantic BPM day in Berlin). Many BPM applications are also case management applications, but some case management requires more sophisticated event-handling, rule-driven processes, decision management, and case record management and recording (technologies that TIBCO mostly covers under BPM+). One school of thought is that the more sophisticated requirements for case management need to be rolled into the common BPM standards stack (including BPMN); another is that multiple different standards should be used flor flexibility (such as combining BPMN with BMM, PRR and DMN). From an event processing perspective, of course, case management (by one definition at least!) involves applying incoming events to the state of some case in order to determine whether processes need to be started, continued, halted or changed - in other words CEP technology can often be applied for case management areas in government, finance, healthcare, etc.

Some of the other case management discussions can be found from EBizQ, Bruce Silver, and Derek Miers.