Sunday, January 18, 2009

On Another Event Processing

This is past event that was held in Waterloo almost two years ago and dealt with "quilt hanging".

One of the interpretations of the term "event" in The Webster dictionary online is : something that happens. This one has been used by the EPTS glossary editors. But there are also some other interpretations, one of them is: social occasion or activity

Today in a meeting with some students they have attracted my attention to an interesting set of products that are processing events, however, the event they process are of the second type and not the first type. There are several companies that have products in this area, and the one name I remember is Eventful.
I Mention it just as an example, as I have not investigated this area, I understand that there are some others as well.

As a food for thought -- what is the difference between the two types of "event processing" ?

First Try:

Products in the first interpretation are typically geared towards the enterprise market, an event typically is assumed to occur within a single time-point (actually an interval reduced to a time-point), and the reason for doing it is typically one of the list that I have mentioned in a previous posting.

Products in the second interpretation are typically geared towards the consumer market through the Web, thus the business model is totally different; an event typically occurs in an interval, the participants in the events are often at the center, and the processing related to them. The motivations related to person's free time, and sometimes to social or other collaboration.

An interesting question is whether from technology point of view these two interpretations are totally distinct or have some commonality (e.g. both have producers, consumers, processing, events, subscription etc..), is this commonality interesting enough to try and generalize them, and whether there is any good reason to inter operate and mix event of the two types...


2 comments:

Richard Veryard said...

Here's a first take on your question.

What happens at a type-2 event? Relationships and collaborations are forged or developed, knowledge is created, a whole series of state-changes. In other words, it is a meaningful cluster or container of type-1 events.

Or at least it is intended to be. If nothing or nobody changes state at a type-2 event, then the event is a failure.

Clearly any account of type-2 events will have to make sense for different stakeholders - both those who are participating for business reasons (such as an industry fair) and those who are participating as part of their personal self-development (such as a funfair).

Unknown said...

I think it is very easy to see that the blending and interoperability of these two event types will need to happen. Looking at the web as a platform, data is being streamed from a multitude of sources. The concept of user activity streams is being used here. Peers subscribe to the streams of other peers. You pointed out the same pub-sub model.

The "social" aspects of a person's life includes their calendar(s). These calendar events, along with the meta-data of their social graph (contact, communities, etc), should provide a means to signal actionable data. With these streams changing in parallel, the concepts used in type one event processing would be useful for type two events.