On composite contexts

Today is a happy day to the Israeli scientific community it was announced that Professor Ada Yonath from the Weizmann Institute won a Nobel prize in chemistry, this adds to two Israeli scientists that won a Nobel prize in chemistry a few years ago, so Israel is a chemistry super-power. Computer science was not exist when Nobel decided on prizes, the equivalent is Turing Awards, that, if I am not mistaken, have been already awarded to three Israeli scientists, so we are not bad in this area either..

Back to event processing thinking --- getting progress on the EPIA book, yesterday we had two hours review with the editor on editorial stuff around the last three chapters, and upon revision, it will get to the 2/3 review. Our target date for publication is now April 2010, and this will probably be the final target.

Anyway, to continue my previous posting on contexts, I would like to discuss the notion of context composition. Recall that context is grouping of events based on one of the following: time, space, state and segment, for either grouping in order to apply operations on this group, or make distinct behavior for distinct groups. Composite context -- as its name suggests is just a multi-dimensional context, i.e. it contains cross-section of several contexts.
In the picture below this is a composition of segmentation ("per customer") and time (in this case fixed sliding temporal interval - per hour, each square is a context partition.


This is just example of combination, there are other useful compositions such as: spatio-temporal context: partition with one dimension is time and one is location oriented, or space and state contexts combination, example: spatial context == within the city of Trento, state of weather = {sunny, cloudy, rainy, snowing}, in each of these partitions other agents are applicable.

Somebody asked me -- what is the benefit of using the context abstraction anyway --- the answer is, like any other abstraction -- it saves work. The same application can be written with much less code and is much simpler to develop, maintain and understand --- the use of context is quite useful in this sense, see also some discussion by Marco. Next -- I'll write more about the next chapters on event processing patterns, stay tuned.