Monday, December 17, 2007

CEP and the story of the captured traveller














Reading the recent posting of my friend Tim Bass entitled "CEP and the story of the Fish" I decided to answer with another story (from the other side of Asia) :

A traveller went in the jungle somewhere on the globe and unfortunately was captured by a tribe that is still using ancient weapons. He is brought to the chief, and the chief says - " You have trespassed into the tribe's territory, which is punishable by death, however, I am a very curious person, if you'll show me something I haven't seen before I'll let you go"; our unlucky traveller started to look in his pockets and the only meaningful thing he found was a lighter, so he took his chance, showing it to the chief saying: "this thing makes fire", however, since he was in under a big pressure, he pressed once - no fire, pressed twice - no fire, in the third time the lighter indeed has produced the promised fire, the chief did not hesitate and said "let him go", so our relieved traveller muttered to himself - "I knew that they have not seen a lighter", but surprisingly to him the chief said - "oh, I have seen many lighter, but a Zippo lighter that does not light in the first time I have never seen".

When someone disagrees with somebody else, it is very easy to assume that my point of view is right since I am smarter / knows more / more qualified / older / more experienced / generally always right etc... My preference is not to doubt the wisdom, experience or qualification of anybody that I am arguing / discussing / debating with, but make the arguments on the issue and not on the person who makes the arguments....

Enough introduction -- now for the main message of this posting, the term CEP (Complex Event Processing) has more or less agreed now in the industry to denote "computing that performs operations on complex events", where complex event is an "abstraction or aggregation of events". The term complex does not say that the processing is complex, but that it deals with complex events, as defined. Complex event processing is typically detecting predefined patterns that can be expressed by queries/rules/patterns/scripts and are deterministic in nature. Regardless if I think that this is the best term, I think that it is important to have common agreed terminology, otherwise we are confusing the industry, the customers (and sometimes ourselves). Now, Tim Bass claims that since event processing with stochastic/probabilistic/uncertain nature is more complex than what we call "complex event processing", we have to call this one - "complex event processing", and rename what we call "complex event processing" to be "simple event processing". Unfortunately, it is too late for that - and also not justified, again, since the "complex" in the "complex event processing" does not say that this is "complex processing of events" but that this is "processing of complex events" (very common misconception !). Bottom line: yes - there is another class of event processing capabilities that requires techniques from AI, machine learning, OR etc.. and that is not deterministic in nature; no - I don't think we should call it "complex event processing", we have suggested the term "intelligent event processing" which I have already referred to in previous posting , there are a variety of other postings that I have dedicated to terminology.

More - later

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Opher!

No, I was not thinking about you when I wrote the story of the fish.

In fact, I must not have written the story very well, because to understood the story of the fish, is to know that we are all like the fish, in certain aspects of life, and there is nothing negative to be gleaned from the story.

I have elaborated here, in this post:

http://thecepblog.com/2007/12/17/end-users-should-define-the-cep-market/

Yours faithfully, Tim

Hans said...

If you categorize EP applications based on whether they process deterministic or stochastic data... why not call them deterministic or stochastic event processing? Or does that not sound cool enough? :)

I know that this is more of an issue with how you phrased your writing than a conceptual disagreement, but of course almost every product currently calling itself CEP or EP or even streaming, is used every day to process stochastic data. Anything that is inferring about the nature of the underlying situation based on observed events is working with stochastic data. Even if you mean the use of statistics, I imagine that all or most EP products are used for statistical inference quite frequently.

When you talk about IEP, are you talking about software that comes pre-installed with some certain advanced inference capabilities? A neural net would be an example of this. Or software that learns?
Although, of course, learning does not necessarily relate to stochastic.