ON catching up

This picture is another picture from Finland, this time from the national park Helvetinjärvi in the Tampere area (more or less), but time to move on and return to work, which I am doing rather slowly (apologies to all Emails I have not answered yet, will catch up by the weekend).
A lot of catching up in work, but now I took a small break, drink bitter coffee, and had a quick scan on some Blogs, some deserve detailed responses, but in a catching up mode I'll only provide highlights:

• Marco has written about patterns, there are two comments here - one a terminology comment, he seems to be confused by the distinction between complex event, composite event, situation, event correlation (a term I don't really use) and pattern. These terms came from different sources, and they are not exactly synonyms, I have tried in the past to look at their definitions and outline the relationships among them, the interesting question is do we want to stay with all legacy terms or settle in a fewer terms. This is a question for the community, and for the glossary work group.
• Marco also started to look at list of patterns. I'll refer to it in one of the next postings, I am now working on the chapter in the EPIA book about patterns (chapter 9). We also are looking at it within the language analysis work group.
• Paul Vincent had a few interesting postings, some of them summarize iimpressions from the summer school in Norway in which there seems to have been discussion among different approaches.
• Paul Vincent also had another posting. getting back to the CEP vs. ESP issue. I've already made a short comment to this postings, that I think that this label discussion is somewhat anachronistic, since the term ESP is virtually gone away. Besides the labels, there are indeed different approaches to approach event processing applications, and I think that we'll see more of hybrid approaches. This also deserves a longer discussion.
  
• Paul Vincent also wondered about downloadable as criterion, following the Forrester report, that has put it as one of its 114 criteria to compare EP products. John Rymer from Forrester has responded in ComputerWorld UK. I would like to have further discussion on the Forrester criteria in general (within the catching up I also read the full spreadsheet of comparison, and have some interesting insights), also I need to follow up on the downloadable issue. Not sure if it is a criterion about product quality, but IMHO, free downloadables are important on getting event processing from niche technology to the mainstream, which was the major theme of the Forrester report, this issue of niche vs. mainstream, also deserves a discussion by its own right.
• Hand Gilde has written about the Gartner Hype cycle report. He was not happy from the way that Gartner articulated the value of event processing, and sent the challenge to EPTS to make better articulation of the value of event processing to the general community. I agree that EPTS needs to catch the ball here, and will propose to imitate such activity. As always, I am throwing back the ball to anybody that throws it towards me, I think that Hans is an excellent candidate to be one of the key persons in such an activity, and I call him to quit his bystander position and jump into the cold water.
  
• Mani Chandy who uses his recent Blogs to post articles, has written about "Smarter communities". This also deserves a longer discussion, I agree that we are heading this way in variety of areas that IBM labels as the "smarter world".
  
• Some other references to the Forrester report which seems to catch the attention and kept (almost) everybody relatively happy. I still need to discuss some of the observations from this report. While looking at the detailed spreadsheet, I have did a quick summary of the number of customers reported by the different products. The number looks impressive, I wonder how many of these are currently running systems in production. But I'll let the use case work group chase them to obtain use cases, and ask everybody to help on this -- another topic to discuss.

Well - enough for now, back to the long list of to-dos...