The inventors provide herein methods for the decomposition of initial Filter Criteria (iFCs) into user-independent, global data and user specific data. In various embodiments of the present invention, the approach is based on Trigger point templates that represent families of trigger points, which are able to be instantiated to real trigger points by adding missing user specific data. Trigger point templates are specified at service deployment time and are instantiated to real trigger points and complemented with the other iFC components to form complete iFCs at the time of service subscription. It is demonstrated that the trigger point methods of the present invention facilitate the storing, provisioning and downloading of initial filter criteria and are beneficial in terms of at least storage and run-time efficiency.