This paper addresses the problem of efficient management of events, in particular in those environments where events carry information useful to multiple applications, possibly operating in different domains and at different levels of abstraction. We investigate the problems and opportunities offered by such environments, and define a framework that enables a semantic mapping of events, i.e., enables the processingand successive refinement of events at different levels of abstraction, so that they can be understood and efficiently consumed by business applications. We identify the requirements of an event mapping system and present a specification language, integrating high-level Petri nets and database query languages, which provides the required expressive power to specify complex event processing functions and includes a set of constructs that support the design process and allows efficient implementations. 17 Pages