Event Processing Technical Society Announces First Public Event Processing Glossary of Industry Terms

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Event Processing Technical Society (EPTS) today publicly unveiled its glossary of event processing terms. The purpose of the EPTS glossary is to facilitate industry use of terms in event processing technology by providing a common language for developing applications and software infrastructure that use event processing concepts. The EPTS is a new industry consortium with more than 55 members representing enterprises using event processing including event processing software vendors, academia and industry analysts.

Dr. David Luckham, a pioneer in the event processing field and co-editor of the glossary, explains: “Having a common vocabulary is essential to the success of any discipline. For example, even the most basic term, event, has different meanings depending on the context of use. Sometimes an event is an activity that happens, while in other cases it is something that represents that activity in a computer system.”

The event processing glossary has three goals:

• to accelerate the learning of the event processing concept;
• to further community communication by enabling practitioners to utilize common concepts and terms; and,
• most importantly, to provide a foundation for analysis and the development of best practices, publications and industry standards.

In addition to the recently announced workgroup chartered with developing templates, documentation, and presentations regarding real world event processing use cases, the EPTS is also forming three additional work groups to:

• develop information on event processing reference architecture and functionality leveraging the use case analysis work;
• identify requirements for interoperability among event processing applications and platforms to provide input to other organizations involved in setting standards relevant to event processing;
• collaborate with the academic community to help establish academic courses in this subject.

All of these workgroups will use the glossary terms or amend and extend the glossary.

“The glossary is a living document,” according to Roy Schulte, Vice President and Analyst at Gartner Research and co-author. “We have started with 40 key terms. The definitions will be amended and new terms added in response to suggestions from interested parties.”

“The glossary is a necessary first step to build a common language among the event processing community, it will allow the event processing customers to have a single source of term definitions instead of multiple, and will be the basis for the rest of the EPTS deliverables,” said Dr. Opher Etzion, Chair of the EPTS steering committee.

“Forrester Research has seen an increasing level of interest in and adoption of event technologies in our recent data on software decision makers. Based on this interest we have significantly increased our ongoing research focus in this area. We look forward to the opportunity to collaborate with other members of EPTS in working to align the terminology used around the industry for event technologies, to make it easier for our clients to make sense of the work that we and others are doing to further define and understand this category," said Charles Brett, Principal Analyst in Forrest Research.

The development of the EPTS glossary is an ongoing effort, and input to the next version of the glossary is welcome. To contribute to the EPTS glossary visit the Wiki at http://www.ep-ts.com.

The next EPTS meeting will be held on September 17-19, 2008 in Stamford, CT. Those wishing to participate, please visit http://www.ep-ts.com for additional information.

Background on the Event Processing Technical Society:

The mission of the Event Processing Technical Society is to increase awareness of event processing, to establish a common set of terminology and to guide event processing standards efforts in support of business and academia. The EPTS membership is open to any organization wishing to further the practice of event processing. A full list of founding members is available in http://www.ep-ts.com/. Requests for information can be sent to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Trademarks or service marks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

Quotes from participating businesses and academia:

"With an emerging technology such as Complex Event Processing, one of the barriers to both advancement and adoption can be confusion that stems from inconsistent terminology. One of the ways that EPTS will make a very real difference is by producing and maintaining a standard glossary of terms. Having a common language is key to shared understanding." - Jerry Baulier, CTO, Aleri.

"The Betfair business model is a real time event supply chain – from the generation of fixtures information to the second by second flow of a game to real time market changes. We view having an authoritative glossary of event terminology as the first step towards achieving interoperability of tools and techniques in event processing as well as bringing our suppliers and customers more closely together through a common understanding of events.” - Alex Kozlenkov, Software Engineer, and David Jeffery, Head of Software Architecture, Betfair Limited, London, UK

"Event processing is a key technology in applications that are increasingly important. For example, most aspects of managing energy production and consumption, whether the energy is in the form of electricity from the power grid or oil for cars and power plants, are based on event processing. Homeland security applications, such as detecting and responding to natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes, or detecting and preventing antisocial activities, are also event based. A first step in developing event-based technology is to develop a glossary of terms. This EPTS effort will have significant benefit for many aspects of lives of people across the globe." - Professor Mani Chandy, Cal Tech and one of the event processing industry pioneers.

"CAC Japan is very proud and excited to be a member of EPTS. A lot has been done since we started to get interested in the emerging CEP technology a couple of years ago. Yet, a lot needs to be done for the promise of CEP to be a reality. Joining hands together with EPTS, we look forward to solving the serious awareness problem we have here in Japan. The release of the event processing glossary is a big step forward. It is important that CEP community speaks the same language. It is also important that the language be translated into other languages to help the larger CEP community. That is where we can help.” - Yasuhiko Takasugi, CAC Japan

"Event processing has many potentials, including the potential to be an integrative and coordinative force between disparate organizations, such as between the Federal, State, and Local governmental bodies in the U.S. This potential can only be reached if we first agree on a language to describe our rights and responsibilities while trading event messages. This language will have at its foundation common lexical and diagrammatic terminology which will serve as the foundation of event processing knowledge. For this reason, we consider EPTS to be a critical professional organization to facilitate development of such a language, as well as being a galvanizing force among standards organizations, vendors, contractors, governmental bodies and FFRDCs." - Harvey Reed, Chief Engineer, GCSS-AF (Global Combat Support System - Air Force), MITRE

"Systar is pleased to be a founding member of the EPTS initiative and to participate in a large effort to increase the interoperability of Event Processing technologies with other domains. The BAM domain is an obvious consumer of events and would greatly benefit from the standardization advocated by the EPTS. Systar is proud to join its voice in this process by joining the EPTS community and especially looks forward to the first step of having a standard terminology (glossary)." - Fabien Villard, R&D Architect, Systar

"The launch of the EPTS is an important milestone in the evolution of Event Processing. We are delighted to be part of this community, and we believe that the strong mix of talented people from both the commercial and academic worlds will accelerate the development and adoption of this important new computing paradigm. An important first step is the evolution of common terminology to describe event processing concepts, providing a framework for open discussion, adoption and ultimately maturation." - Patrick Lennon, CEO of WestGlobal

List of members