EDAPS-07 and event processing research community

Hello from Vienna again. Today the event processing meetings festival, that started in the EPTS meeting exactly a week ago, continued (and ended) in Vienna with the EDAPS workshop adjecent to the VLDB conference. The EDAPS workshop was chaired by Ling Liu and myself. Unlike the previous meetings, EDAPS is a scientific workshop, where the accepted papers were selected by a program committee. This has been the second time we are doing this workshop, and it was attened by around 20 people with interesting papers. One of the issues we have discussed in the closing session is the creation of a unified research conference, this year there have been three such conferences: DEBS 2007, DEPSA 2007 and EDAPS, besides that other conferences like RULE-ML 2007 has some track on "reaction rules", while database conferences have tracks on "streams". Indeed, event processing has many roots - verification/simulation, active databases, stream management, pub/sub, distributed computing, rules, programming languages, sensor networks and maybe I forgot something, but the challange is to try and devise a community of researchers whose primary discipline will be event processing. A first step is to try and devise one annual conference that will unify all forces. We have proposed the DEBS steering committee to open up and make DEBS such a conference, as the "flagship" of the event processing community, and decided in 2008 not to hold EDAPS instance, to give a chance to DEBS to build a strong conference. Alex Buchmann who will chair the program committee of DEBS 2008 in Rome will work to extend the program committee and we'll help him recruit industry/vendors participation. In my opinion, a research community associated with event processing is important for the existance of event processing as an area and discipline.

One last comments about EDAPS - we have invited Mike Stonebraker to be keynote speaker, Mike is certainly a great speaker, however, he has chosen to wear his vendor hat, and provided sales pitch, with some assertions and generalizations that I wonder if Mike Stonebraker the distinguished scientist would have accepted for publication... well. Tomorrow, the VLDB conference - more later.