What can we learn from paradigms that succeeded ?

Today I have taken a few hours off my generally busy schedule, and visited the "National Air and Space Museum" in Washington D.C.; the globe shown above is showing stars as they were known in the 16th century (if my memory does not mislead me), the museum is very impressive (I have seen it 14 years ago, which was my last time in the Washington area, somehow it is not on my path). Anyway, I got here to attend (parts of) the OMG Technical Meeting. I was invited to give a talk in the MARS session about EPTS and EP related standards, as a prelude to a "complex event processing standards" workshop that will occur tomorrow (I'll be able to be only in the first half, need to catch a flight - so apologies to the other presenters, but I am quite familiar with the different players...). I have already written in the past on event processing standards more than once, so I'll not repeat myself -- if the organizers will post my presentation on a website, I'll advertise the URL. However, I would like to show one of the concluding slides I've presented (actually reused it, I've presented this slide before...)

This slide shows an example of a successful paradigm - relational database. In order to get there we still need a lot of brain power, we are not really there, we are now, as I have written before, in a similar situation to databases in the sixties, currently we can do standards on the interoperability issues, and on modeling - however, we still need to get to the "heart of the matter" -- a relatively simple theory of event processing -- similar to what relational theory did to databases. Working on a single frame of thinking will also add the brain power of the research community as done for relational database with the massive work on query optimization - in EP the optimization issues is not easier (I think they are more difficult, and cannot be done incrementally from other disciplines' optimizations). Are we there -- not really ! Can we be there --- I believe that the answer is positive... More than that, in order to get to the main stream of computing we'll need to do the equivalent to ALL items on the slide...

Some people who heard my talk were skeptical - which is fine, I am surrounded by skeptical people all my life, got used to it. They have good reasons to be skeptic, and I have a good reason to be optimistic -I have always been a best-case-scenario person, and know it does not work, but in the attempt one lands close enough... more - later.