Saturday, June 16, 2012

On the world wide event processing network


In a recent post on the complexevents site, David Luckham and Roy Schulte write about "complex event processing and the future of business decisions".   There are some examples, and some analysis of the current market, but I would like to write about a single sentence in this article: " In the early days of the Internet, some communication experts remarked that there was theoretically only one network in the world, although some segments (subnets) hadn’t be connected into the whole yet. A similar thing can now be said about EPNs: there is theoretically only one EPN in the world, although some stove-pipes are not yet tied in – and some never will be".    

This draws similarity between the WWW and the world of events.   In the WWW we view the sites as the nodes in the graphs and links as edges.  Typically we draw EPN as event processing agents in the nodes, and event streams as edges, but maybe to draw the analogy with the WWW, we need to switch the role, make events as the nodes, and agents as links that create other events, we also can add other types of causality relations among events as edges in the graph.    The idea that all events (raw or derived) in the universe are conceptually linked within a single network has been mentioned in David Luckham's idea on "holistic event processing" .   This can be thought as active addition to the WWW,  and will make the world situation aware.       This will require standardization in several levels - both the semantic and interoperability aspects.    

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