Dealing with Heterogeneous Data in Pub/Sub Systems: The Concept-Based Approach

The event-based approach is well suited for integrating autonomous components or applications into complex systems by means of exchanging events. Event-based systems need an event dissemination mechanism to deliver relevant events to interested consumers. The publish/subscribe interaction paradigm has been gaining relevance in this context. One of the main characteristics of publish/subscribe systems is that they decouple producers and consumers so that they can remain unknown to each other. Therefore, the consideration of data heterogeneity issues is fundamental. However, most pub/sub notification services do not support the interaction among heterogeneous event producers and consumers. In this paper we describe the concept-based approach as a high-level dissemination mechanism for distributed and heterogeneous event-based applications. It enhances the notification service by enabling it to pass semantic information across component, institutional or cultural boundaries. It provides a high level abstraction for a meaningful exchange of data within the pub/sub interaction paradigm.