Time to start the 2010 list of “interesting” CEP and rule-related conferences…so far I have 4 5 on the list, covering 2 3 weeks in May to July…  (yes I had forgotten Dagstuhl…). So, by date order:

• Week starting 16 May, location Europe:
  • 2010 Dagstuhl Event Processing seminar, Dagstuhl in Germany, 16-21 May, theme = task-oriented, focused on a joint effort between the academic participants and the industrial participants (vendors, customers, analysts) … output will be a manifesto for the event processing discipline…
• Week starting 21 June, location USA:
  • OMG Business Rules Symposium, co-located with the OMG Technical Meeting in Minneapolis, MN, day TBA, likely to cover the OMG rule standards such as SBVR (for documenting business rules) and PRR (for production rules)…
  • Semantic Technology Conference / RuleML co-organised Rules Track, San Francisco, June 21-25, theme = semantic rules [...are] more powerful, flexible, and active forms of “structured” knowledge…
• Week starting 12 July, location UK:
  • ACM’s DEBS2010, Cambridge, July 12-15, theme = dissemination of original research, the discussion of practical insights, and the reporting on relevant experience relating to event-based computing… which was very interesting last year, and is “in cooperation with” the EPTS.
  • Rule2010 workshop, Edinburgh, July 14, theme = rule-based programming in Industry and the Semantic Web… which seems a bit wide to me (i.e. there is not much “semantic web” overlap with “industry”).

At DEBS last week, the EPTS Language and Use Case working groups presented tutorials, and the EPTS Reference Architecture group (co-chaired by TIBCO) met for a useful catch-up session. But sorely missed were the “Glossary-ers”, tasked with standardizing the terminology used in event processing applications and systems. The importance of this came to light when a discussion started up about whether “incidents” were events (which of course they are, although they may not be detectable at the time they occur). Opher Etzion (from IBM Research) covered some more of this in his discussion on the Use Case tutorial.

Interestingly, there is a whole ITIL section on the process of Incident Management, which seems yet another application area for Complex Event Processing (at least for the detection part: other aspects may also include decision management and process management).

Other observations from DEBS were that:

• Compared to previous years, there was much more focus on event processing rather than the (possibly simpler, probably more established) aspects of pub-sub middleware.
• ACM accreditation seems to have done the conference no harm, and indeed seems to have made the organisers’ lives easier.
• There was little in the way of progress to standards, with no or little mention of PRR or RIF; at least the Siemens CEP team were progressing on an interesting project using BMM, and were interested in the proposed EMP. The latter is awaiting more interest, including that likely to result from a supposedly planned link-up between the EPTS and OMG…
• Was it just me, or did there seem to be a dominance of attendees (and presenters) from Germany? Is the land of “Vorsprung durch Technik” stealing a lead in IT by recognizing the advantages of event processing over conventional data processing?

Next year DEBS’10 moves back to Europe to the tranquil quads (and incorrect punting technique) of Cambridge University. Attendees can probably look forward to cries of  “Ich habe sich in den Fluss!” or somesuch…

Dr John Bates of Apama, cofounder of one of the earliest vendors in the CEP space, gave a very nice keynote presentation at DEBS. Apama’s view on CEP market trends include things like location-aware telco services such as real-time dating (!), transport and logistics, etc. In particular John predicted:

• the rise of event-driven business rules, tracking anything on the planet
• federated services and the agile “enterprise nervous system”, including event rules in the cloud(s), in IT Architecture
• the demise of the specialist “EP”/”CEP” market with its replacement by “Event Driven BPM” covering rules, events and BPM as well as industry apps embedding event processing.

One automatically respects speakers when they politely reference their industry competitors - for example John gave due credit to TIBCO for pushing event processing in market areas beyond Capital Markets, as well as rule-engine-based event processing. And there was nothing in John’s presentation we could disagree (much) with. Except maybe the need for that CEP-driven dating thing…

[Disclaimer: Apama is a competitor to TIBCO BusinessEvents in the CEP market].

The next DEBS “tutorial” was effectively the EPTS Language Analysis group report. As a vendor not involved in this group I wondered if it would miss something that is covered (or planned) in TIBCO BusinessEvents. But instead this proved a well executed and informative session by 3 presenters covering stream processing, rules, agents, semantics, IDEs and formal theory.

A few comments from a TIBCO perspective on the content. Firstly, there was a summary slide showing all the different language approaches by vendor and research event processing systems including TIBCO (BusinessEvents). Now, guess which of the following BusinessEvents was aligned to: “Inference Rules”, “ECA rules”, “Agent oriented”, “SQL Extension”, “State Oriented” or “Imperative/script based”? Well, the first was correct, but you could also make a case for all of these being supported (events driving production rules, multiple-agents, continuous query language, state models, and what we call rule functions).

On the differences between ECA rules and production rules: event-driven inference rule engines combine the features of both Rete-based inference rules AND Event Condition Action rules. If no event is defined then the rule acts as a normal production rule; if (one or more) events are part of the rule definintion then the event(s) must occur for the rule to fire. And its not as if the rule firing order of ECA rules is standardized…

On the IDEs for event processing languages: of course many might complain that rule languages don’t have the draw-your-application simplicity of the stream-processing-via-queries community. This is because production rules used in inference engines are “declarative” - they can be defined in any order: and you can’t (or shouldn’t) draw lines between declarative rules (although creating such a diagram from the current rule definitions would work!). Instead, conventional production rule systems are often supported by a (process) diagram called a ruleflow; on the other hand, BusinessEvents supports a drag-and-drop state model diagram tool.

Overall an excellent and informative session - sorry, tutorial!

This week is the DEBS09 conference (sadly, more bearded academics than dainty debutantes).

Things kicked-off with the “Event Processing Use Cases” tutorial (in reality a report by the Event Processing Technical Society Use Case working group). The group has created a good use case proforma but the 5 use cases presented, although somewhat representative of event processing applications, seemed to be “pre-commercial” research and academic “use cases” rather than real live production applications. This may be less important than it feels, and the wider EP/CEP community (including TIBCO) are of course to blame for not yet contributing customer use cases… but as a consequence it is premature to derive any useful conclusions from this small sample.

Hopefully the EPTS will manage to encourage a more useful, larger library of use cases? Perhaps EPTS contributor and analyst Gartner could announce an “EPTS Use Case Award” every year?

In any TIBCO customer would be happy to work with us to contribute an EPTS Use Case, please drop us a line!