Wednesday, February 2, 2011

First comperhensive survey on event processing



The first  comprehensive survey on event processing  was accepted for publication in ACM Computing Surveys, the leading avenue of publication for surveys.  the survey was co-authored by GIANPAOLO CUGOLA and ALESSANDRO MARGARA and is available from the Politecenico di Milano webpage,  the paper surveys the area from the days of active databases until current products. The paper view complex event processing, data streams and active databases as kind of information flow processing, and as such information flow contains both events and data, thus the scope of this survey is quite large.  It compares different languages and systems in data model, rule model, time model and language model aspects.   In some cases I would probably use different terminology, but overall it is quite a comprehensive paper (70 pages long!) , and should be an interesting reading to anybody interested in this area.
Enjoy! 

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

On DEBS 2011 challenge track


Today, the DEBS 2011 challenge has been published. 
This is one of the new tracks of DEBS that will hopefully start a tradition within DEBS conferences.
The idea exists in other conferences, and is new to this community, in essence the challenge is a specification of an event processing application with some implementation challenges, along with evaluation criteria.


The track chair for the challenge track is Nenad Stojanovic, and the criteria set for this year are usability criteria:
correctness and  simplicity of constructing the application.    These are softer criteria relative to performance comparision, but are timely.  


The challenge is open to all:  commercial products, open source products, research prototypes, home grown event processing systems; submissions can be done in the competitive and non-competitive tracks.  Those in the competitive track may win awards,  but the non competitive implementers will also gain an opportunity to showcase their solution.    I hope that the community will be responsive to the challenge, and this will serve as a showcase to show the different approaches side by side.      More on new DEBS 2011 tracks - later.