Are event processing technologies applicable for static data?

An interesting question was asked by Hans Gilde to one of my previous posts, "You focus on EP for moving data, but I wonder what you have found as fas as using the concepts for stored events".

The fact that I am concentrating on event processing is true, I would not equate "event" with "moving data", since event has some semantic meaning of something that happens, and has some time dimensions associated with it, so I would classify is as a kind of moving data, some moving data are not events.

There are indeed some benefits to use event processing concepts over stored data, I'll talk about one aspect which is the notions of pattern and context.

An expression like:

The vehicle moving in consistent direction south within the temporal context that starts with surveillance start and ends with vehicle stops partitioned by vehicle.

This is (more or less -- it should be done with a visual language rather than textual) a combination of pattern and context. This is somewhat easier than writing the same in SQL. There were attempts to mix SQL and patterns, but keeping the SQL semantics makes it somewhat complex. If we can use such a language, programming may be easier, this can be translated to SQL in the background.

There are some other benefits to use EP concepts for databases as well as for messaging systems, BRMS, and other related technologies.

On another matter: I am reading with interest Mark Palmer's nine predictions for the future of event processing, I promise a review after he'll finish to write all nine (now he is in #3).

More - Later.

What's coming in 2010 for the event processing community?

While we celebrated our new year in September, we are using the Gregorian calendar as our civil calender for any practical use. I am still not sure exactly what will be my own focus in 2010, the equation has too many free variables right now, hope to instantiate some of them soon.

This is the time to say something about what is planned for the event processing community, here are collection of items, not necessarily complete, and not necessarily in order of importance:

• OMG plans to launch "event processing consortium" similar to the SOA or BPM consortia, this will concentrate on the business/application side of event processing. I'll write more about it as concrete plans will become public
• We shall hold a Dagstuhl seminar about event processing in May. This is a forum to which the leading persons in a certain area are invited for a 5 days retreat in an isolated place, the goal will be to work on "event processing manifesto". I'll probably write more about it in time.
• The main research conference of the EP community, DEBS, is now ACM conference (starting 2009) and will take place in Cambridge, UK.
• The EPTS annual symposium will return to the USA, probably in the west coast in the 4th quarter. More details to come.
• More event processing books to come -- the Event Processing in Action book, by Peter Niblett and myself will be out around May 2010. In the pipeline there is also a new book by David Luckham about event processing applications.
• EPTS work-groups will have further results: A new version of the glossary, a summarizing paper of the language analysis work-group, more from other work-groups as well.
• More workshops specific to the interaction of event processing with other disciplines are likely to happen more (e.g. event-driven BPM, event based functionality in robotics - already occurred this year).

As for the business side, I'll leave the predictions to analysts, but we'll see more business growth and more awareness of this area, maybe additional start-ups emerge, maybe more acquisitions will occur, maybe some development we cannot see now. Hope for an interesting and fruitful year.