Event Driven

Event driven communication

‘Event-driven’ communication is a way of restructuring the logistics of information exchange between the IT systems of companies and government agencies. Instead of a data owner sending messages when something of importance needs to be communicated (‘fire and forget’), all parties involved receive a signal from the data owner that something relevant has happened (‘publish event to subscribers’). That event contains metadata and a link to the source of the data. The receiving party evaluates the metadata and decides whether to follow the link to the source and access the data.

Advantages

This approach has many advantages:

efficiency:
- no polling needed
- low load on resources
effectiveness:
- easy to distribute to many parties involved
- ‘single truth’ data at the source
- synchronization of activities
control:
- distributing events with metadata reveals relatively little information that can be abused for criminal purposes
- any party who wishes to access data can only do so by authenticating themselves at the source.
- authorization rules define what data can be accessed by what role/party
- the sender of events registers who has accessed what data and when, including who has NOT accessed data

Event-driven communication requires:

semantic definitions of events;
a distribution mechanism;
a means to relate events to each other (sequence) (under development);
a means to ‘go back in time’ and inspect earlier events (under development).