Event handling for the universal enterprise

Abstract

Current trends in the global economy are leading to inter-enterprise interactions and to new business models that depend on the timely notification of events and the reaction to them. In this paper we present a distributed reactive middleware that supports the proactive notification of events in heterogeneous environments. The infrastructure consists of a publish/subscribe notification mechanism and a reactive functionality. We represent events that may originate from heterogeneous sources together with their ontology-based context metadata to make them self-describing beyond the boundaries of the event source. We introduce the notion of concept-based addressing to publish/subscribe systems. Concept-based addressing allows us to express subscriptions to events according to different contexts than those of the published events and yet match them successfully. By using ontologies and context definitions consistently for events, notifications, subscriptions and reactions we provide the necessary support for event handling in global enterprises. © 2005 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.