Mātārere: A Layered Framework for Specifying Event-Based Systems

Event-based systems (EBS) have received increasing attention in the past decade from various communities. Central to these systems is the notion of event, which is often considered as ”a happening of interest”. An EBS encompasses a large range of functionalities on various technological levels (e.g., language, execution, or communication). Many approaches exist to handle events and the solutions are not always either defined on a clear level or well understood. This is mainly due to the difference between the communities that tackle the issues, which also leads to some confusion in the terminology. The notion of events itself is often not clearly defined and varies from one approach to the other.This paper presents M?t?rere, a layer decomposition of a generic EBS into levels of abstraction. The goal of the solution proposed here is threefold: (1) provide unifying terminology, (2) understand better the various existing approaches which take place on different levels, and (3) offer some support to build an EBS using this uniform framework. A strength of our approach lies in the consideration of recursion - in the sense that all layers may repeat themselves on different system levels - allowing a better modeling of complex event-based systems.

A. Voisard and H. Ziekow

Technical Report