Reading a paper from last year’s Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2009) academic conference, I came across some references to various “event standards”. All of these were very domain specific, but 2 seemed they might have more generic uses.

One was Events-ML G2 from the International Press Telecommunications Council for registering “events as in conferences, meetings etc” (rather than the sorts of events the CEP world is mainly interested in). The event schema therefore includes properties such as phone and contact details, implicitly recording the observer’s data on the event (as opposed to some observer identifier from which that and other data could be gleaned, presumably). On the other hand they did have a nice test form!).

Event in Event Ontology

There was also an “Event Ontology” defined as part of a Music Ontology (!) project. Things started well when the authors stated:

This ontology is centered around the notion of event, seen here as the way by which cognitive agents classify arbitrary time/space regions, which is essentially the view expressed by Allen and Fergusson [or its HTML version via Google].

The next quote was less impressive though, seemingly going beyond abstraction and on into the realm of philosophy…

[..] events are primarily linguistic or cognitive in nature. That is, the world does not really contain events. Rather, events are the way by which agents classify certain useful and relevant patterns of change.

Reviewing their definition of event we see relationships between event and:

• place and time
• factors and products
• agents (acting on the events)

Presumably from the musician’s point of view, a set of notes (as events) may combine into a musical chord (an event product) - or in other words, agents combine events and context (”factors”) to define complex events (”products”). So not a million miles away from the EPTS’ labors on the EPTS Glossary, newly refreshed in a draft version 2…

Draft Reference Architecture

Some folks may have seen earlier updates on the EPTS Reference Architecture work. Well, the latest (Architect role Functional view) draft seems to be getting some approval (so far) among Reference Architecture Working Group members. Some of the terminology may change slightly to conform to (or influence) the EPTS Glossary; other roles and views are still in progress.

EPTS hasn’t set up a public review mechanism yet, so participants’ blogs will have to do: feedback posted here will be posted back to the working group wiki. Once the Working Group is satisfied with this, the Steering Committee and membership of EPTS will vote on it, and then it can be made “official”.

Opher Etzion recorded some action items for the Event Processing Technical Society at the EPTS5 symposium last week. One of these was “promotion of EPTS” as the go-to resource for event processing information (hence the irony that these action items are duly  listed on Opher’s blog and not anywhere on the EPTS web site).

One of these was the idea of an ROI Working Group to share and propagate ROI stories (this being a safe activity for vendors to share as customers seeing ROI will not likely be poachable by other vendors!). But how should ROI be measured and reported?

Coincidentally a colleague just mentioned an airline customer who just went live with a new track-and-trace CEP application -  an application with an estimated €2M per year payback.

Some observations here:

• This was an IT project completed during a big downswing in the airline industry, whilst many other conventional IT projects were being cancelled or postponed - but the ROI was compelling enough for this project to survive.
• The application used a distributed rule engine architecture, exploiting TIBCO BusinessEvents‘ agent-based architecture.

Another coincidence: I was just listening to Paul Coby, CIO of BA, talking about the need for lean and agile approaches in the airline industry, at IRMUK’s BPM2009. His message was ‘there are no IT projects, only business projects’ - all with business goals and KPIs to be measured. Model-driven CEP applications like the airline use case above certainly qualify as lean and agile… I wonder if BA is exploiting CEP like its competitors are?

The second day of the EPTS meeting in Trento covered some diverse topics such as:

• Network and Systems Management: event processing aspects (including views from Tivoli and CA) - this is already recognised in TIBCO with CEP-based products like ActiveMatrix Service Performance Manager providing much of the same role.
• CEP Research areas had some fascinating topics, including:
  • The role of CEP in Advanced Robotics (Bielefeld University)
  • IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative: basically the need to integrate event processing with business decisions (which may sound familiar) and advanced analytics (also familiar). From TIBCO’s perspective though the main area requiring research here is event-based analytics - determining what analytic algorithms (beyond rules) are adaptable for (or need redeveloping for) the event-based, dynamic, IT world.
  • Some interesting event pattern benchmarking (from FZI) using their own research algorithms as well as open source tools, with some interesting results … possibly this will help restart the EPTS Benchmarking initiative, and for sure the vendors would like to try out the same patterns.
  • Intelligent Event Processing (Toronto University) showed how Markov models could be used in network intrusion detection.

One of the main purposes of the EPTS Symposium was to report the progress of the various EPTS Working Groups. These included:

• Use Cases: EPTS is increasing the range of use cases, and considering classifications to cover in-production and theoretical cases - presenteded use cases included enterprise IT management and using social media stream analysis for marketing support, respectively.  The chair’s grand challenges included exploitng the vast knowledge of the “Management of Data” domain (which some could view as avoiding “re-inventing the wheel”, others as following the same old practices that lead to problematic IT performance), as well as EPTS communications (such as public blog critiques instead of internal communications - no idea what that is about) especially between working groups.
• Reference Architecture: vendors including TIBCO, IBM, Oracle and Streambase presented as well as the host University of Trento. The participant architectures provoked some good Q&A and ideas (for the WG and future blogging!). We stole exploited the Use Case WG example on Healthcare to demonstrate the applicability of the architectures, but there is still work to be done on combining the ideas into a useful form.
• Glossary: the chairs of the Glossary WG were not in Trento but joined by phone. There were some revisions to the glossary under discussion, and it seems the discussion is finally exploiting the EPTS wiki (hoorah for Web 1.5-based collaboration!).
• Languages: Opher gave an update on the work of the Languages WG, which seems to be at a crossroads: metalanguage or EP language classifications?  The WG presentation ended with a long discussion on standards - need, role, level etc. (My 2c contribution was that EPTS needs to avoid developing standalone new standards and should concentrate on supporting updates to existing standards for event handling, both at the domain (e.g. supply chain) and IT (e.g. W3C RIF) levels. And maybe push the Java Community Process (like being done for constraint programming) to compete with MSSI…