Totem is an event sourcing framework framed as a timeline. Other event sourcing implementations tend to emit to individual streams, as opposed to the one common stream. The main tradeoff between this is that of total order VS contention. The timeline stream has a total order for all of the events in an area. This can be of use when an order is needed over the topics within an area. The downside of such one common stream is that of contention; many events need to write to that one and single stream.
There is one timeline stream per area
and it is the single source of truth for an area.
An event on this stream contains a 'value' (the payload of the event) and 'metadata'. The metadata contains several interesting fields: