A business event represents a semantically defined set of states, relevant for the business domain. Event serves as informal description and is used in the scope (context) of entire model of the business domain.

Business events per se cannot be manupulated by computers as they are sheer abstractions and in order to manipulate them, an application system must create an event object - an electronic signal or a message of the event. A message consisting of an event object is called notification.

In other words, event is a happening, while notification is a report of the happening.

Events are used in order to synchronize business processes with their environment, that is to capture changes of interest for the course of business processes. The changes can be internal as well as external to the company and to the business process in particular. This type of synchronization helps to keep business more responsive to all changes affecting it directly or indirectly, or in other words it adds to business agility.

A call from a client would be a good example of a business event which triggers a certain business process or a group of processes into action, say, order registration or client check.

This particular event represents not just one business state, but a whole set of business states with the common part that says that there is a call received from a client, whereas all other parts of these states could be different.

Other examples are address change, stock trade, shipment delivery, bank transaction etc.

• Starting event - signifies a start of a business process or a whole group of processes starting with the same event
• Intermediate event - events that are generated in the course of a business process as a signal to other business processes to start
• Ending event - denotes an end of a business process

• Ordinary event - an insignificant (in a certain business context) event
• Notable event - significant event

EXAMPLE: a product leaving a warehouse is an ordinary event, unless the price of the product exceeds $10000. If the price of the product is more then that amount, this event becomes notable and may invoke a whole range of actions, unlike an ordinary event.

• Direct - an activity of a business participant is the cause of the event (based on the state change)
• Indirect - an event is not produced during active execution, but is derived from other events (based on some condition on state) e.G. time-based, derived

• Flat - simple event representing a basic datatype
• Complex - compound event, composed of several simple events

happening

• Event Driven Architecture(EDD): http://complexevents.com/?cat=11
• Types of events from OMG point of view: http://www.bpmn.org/Samples/Elements/Events.htm