Type erased resource and event implementation

My understanding is that these are supposed to be fairly light weight classes. I think resources are trivial most of the time, but events may need to own their data.
The type erasure is currently implemented with inheritance and shared_ptr. Does it make sense to use std::variant when we move to c++17?

Start by reviewing the resource and event classes and their current type-erasure implementation using inheritance and shared_ptr. Compare their ownership needs with a possible std::variant design for C++17; done requires an agreed design and corresponding implementation.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.