In the previoius posting I started the discussion about the notion of pattern, and stated that it is a function that selects an event subset; continuing to drill down on patterns, I'll say a few words about what are the ingredients of pattern definitions, what information do we need in order to perform pattern matching in a well-defined way:- Pattern type: which determines WHAT the pattern matching is looking for. There are a variety of pattern types, and I'll dedicate a posting to the pattern type I collected so far. Some examples: sequence (temporal pattern), moving north (spatio-temporal pattern), trheshold pattern (e.g. related to average of some value over a set) and more.
- Participant set: the set of event types whose instances issue the pattern matching set.
- Context: the context to which the pattern is associated with (actually the agent executing the pattern is associated with).
- Pattern assertion: Some patterns have assertions associated with them. Assertion can determine if events are relevant (e.g. if we are looking at a sequence of two events, say event of type E1, and event of type E2, where in order to do a pattern matching we require that E1.A > E2.B, where A and B are names of attributes. There are also some pattern associated with certain pattern type, e.g. if the pattern type is a threshold pattern than there is an assertion associated with it, e.g. Average (e1.A) [over each context partition] > 40.
- Pattern policy: Pattern policy determines when a matching set is going to be activated, how many times, can event count for more than one pattern, how repeated events are treated and more.
This was only in title level, and in the next postings I'll provide more information about pattern types and pattern policies.
