Visual languages for event integration specification

Abstract

We are exploring existing approaches and developing new techniques for visual event-based system integration. We are using domain-specific visual languages with different high-level visual metaphors (including Tool Abstraction, Event-Query-Filter-Action and Spreadsheet) to specify event-handling support and provide backend processing tool support for event integration specification and visualisation of event propagation. We aim to generalise from three exemplar visual event-driven system metaphors and develop a new, generic visual event handling metaphor. From this we will build a visual environment for specifying event-based system integration. The visual metaphor we are developing should adapt the event-based communication model to a wide range of application domains, and also should support complex and intelligent system design and implementation.