EVL: A Typed Higher-order Functional Language for Events

Abstract We define EVL, a minimal higher-order functional language for dealing with generic events. The notion of generic event extends the well-known notion of event traditionally used in a variety of areas, such as database management, concurrency, reactive systems and cybersecurity. Generic events were introduced in the context of a metamodel to deal with obligations in access control systems. Event specifications are represented as records and we use polymorphic record types to type events in our language. We show how the higher-order capabilities of EVL can be used in the context of Complex Event Processing (CEP), to define higher-order parameterised functions that deal with the usual CEP techniques.