Events:The Great De-coupler - Determine the Independance score of an event system.

Events are the great de-coupler because their very nature changes our prospective from command-oriented computing to situation-oriented.

Think about it. Most of the things we have learned in CIS courses was how to help the computer issue commands. It is easier, in some senses, to just command the reaction that we want rather than put it in context so that the situation can be understood by people who didn't write the event publisher. When we simply command the reaction we want, we are increasing coupling. We are tying a dependency from the application that raised the event to the application that reacts to it. I contend that by properly creating the event object with the appropriate references and ontology that support those references that we can decouple our events and our applications even further! We can even go to the point of reacting to events that are created outside of our sphere of influence automatically.

A goal of the event processing community should be to make semantically-aware events that can be consumed by an application or engine with no knowledge of or organizational affiliation to the event's publisher.

To start off, we need to design events to live outside of a particular application, department and organization and even an particular industry. We have already taken strides when various taxonomies and ontology for industry are created. They take the real-world nouns, processes, and state-changes of the industry and give it a namespace so that all may call things the same. This trend promises to continue and become better at defining them.

The table below defines the various levels of independence for an event object. This isn't just about how do we create a good event object that the system can use. This is about building an ecosystem of information that surrounds the set of events for a given organization giving it a rich environment to influence.

For reference sake:

• Event: The change of state of a noun.
• Event Object: A container that encapsulates the meta-data associated with an observation of an event

Category	Description	Comment
Decoupled	The event object [EO] must exist independent of any computing algorithm that would operate upon it's content. Must be independent of reactions to it.	This leaves algorithm that manipulates the container, moving it, etc. This doesn't mean that things can't operate on its content, just that the event object doesn't rely on the operation for its existence. (Obvious exception is the event creation algorithm)
Subscribe-able	A mechanism must exist so that a subscription of the event object can be requested and the event object delivered upon publication.	This is the classic event-driven architecture.
Descriptive not prescriptive	The event object must indicate what happened (state change/action/lack of state change) and not indicate how to react to what happened. An event object must be independent of commands	This one separates out awareness from commands meaning that an event object should describe the situation not issue a command. There are a lot of messages that are decoupled and subscribe-able but the message issues a command or issues constraints to the reaction to a notification. These would not satisfy this level of events.
Contextual	EO must indicate/identify the noun (object) the event is in reference to EO must indicate the state that the noun changed to EO may indicate the state of the noun that the noun changed from An event object must be independent of embedded knowledge in the ecosystem.	This basically says that an event must self-containing it's direct references. The Event Object should answer the questions: What happened? To whom? When? Where? What are the details? What is the certainty?... All of these are referenced inside the event object.
Referenced	EO references must be governed by a taxonomy/ontology An event object must be independent of semantic ambiguity	Referenced means that all pieces of context are referenced to some source outside the event. Similar to Fielding's REST concepts. It should be a URI or something that can identify the subject.
Dimensional	Nouns have defined dimensions that are made up of defined states or values. Since events are an observation of the change of state for a noun, the referenced taxonomy should have a well defined dimensions, states, and values for all nouns under its jurisdiction.	In my view, nouns have dimensions (attributes) that either describe a state or a property. In this maturity, the dimensions must be defined as well as what legal state/value can exist in that dimension.
Cross-referenceable	The taxonomies must be systemically translatable to other taxonomies causing semantic interdependence.	By developing cross-referenced taxonomies, organization outside of the sphere of influence of the event publisher can understand and utilize the events without requiring human intervention.