On the PLAY project

I have spent this week some time in cold Brussels, in my role of reviewer of the PLAY project, which was a project in the framework of the ICT program of the European Union.    There are quite a few projects that have event processing at their core, in fact early in 2014 we'll be involved in two new projects: SPEED and FERARI, about which I'll write in a later phase.  Being a reviewer, I accompanied the PLAY project since its beginning -- starting with the "kick-off" review, and continuing to the three annual reviews.  As a reviewer, my role is both to evaluate what was done and provide comments and evaluations, and also to be a kind of mentor for the project and try to help them going in the right direction.    The project has evolved during these years, started with event-driven services as a motivation, and in addition touched topics like Internet of Things and events coming from sensors.   It uses RDF and semantic web technology to describe events and patterns, and also plays with the idea of event marketplace, an idea that deserves more discussion in one of the next posts. As for the event processing part, they have developed distributed ETALIS,   I guess that this will be replaced if they want to take it to the real life, as logic programming based languages are great for the few people who understand how to program with them, and a barrier to others.  While this is a research project, and in real-life setting  this implementation will probably be replaced, the approach taken have a promise.  There will also be some follow-ups to this project, which is something that is desirable for these projects, the "after life".   On the whole, this is an opportunity both to assist and to learn, and I hope to hear about the "after life" in the future.