On event processing fuctions

I have been in a short vacation, and went with (some of) my family to see the film 2012, it is based on an ancient prophecy that the world as we know it will come to an end in December 21st, 2012 -- three more years to see whether this prophecy will come true.

This time I would like to write about event processing functions, I have written about them before, just summarizing it in one place.

There are various functions under the roof of event processing, some applications need all of them, but many applications need only part of them, in various level of sophistications.

Here are the major functions that I have observed:

1. Event distribution: This is the most basic one, event consumers are disseminating events through some intermediate brokers (often called channels), the events may be filtered, but are transfered without change, where any processing occur within the consumer's premises and is not part of the event processing system. Pub/sub systems are of this type, and there is a lot of work about such systems in the distributed computing area.

2. Event transformation: This goes another step and send the consumers transformed events, where the transformation may be translation, aggregation, composition, enrichment, projection and split. Aggregation is probably the most notable use of transformation, and there are many applications whose main usage of event processing is transformation.

3. Event pattern matching: This function is to find whether any subset of the input events satisfy a predefined pattern.

Note that some systems require transformation only, some require pattern matching only, some require both, systems can also have different levels of sophistication in both. It may require very simple patterns only, or sophisticated patterns; likewise it may require very simple types of transformation or much more advanced ones.

4. Situation discovery / event pattern discovery: This function is to discover that some situation occurs without having a predefined patterns, using intelligent techniques. While the first three types of functions are more investigated (although I can't say that all issues are figured out), the fourth one is still a challenge, since there are some experiments, but generally it is not well established yet.

This also remind me of a different topic -- misconceptions around event processing, and I'll write about this topic soon.

Concentrating on the important things with event processing

I would like to welcome to the Blogland - Mani Chandy, seen in this picture, one of the pioneers of the event processing area, the person who came to the first event processing symposium in 2006 to tell us what are the obstacles in the way to success in this area, and my partner in organizing the event processing Dagstuhl seminar in 2007, and the second one in 2010.
Mani has recently started a Blog named: Smart systems that sense and respond, so be sure to bookmark it. Mani writes his Blog as mini-papers, including references.

Inspired by the last posting on Mani's Blog I would like to write about a role of event processing that is sometimes overlooked -- not generating more information, but generating less information, or more precisely focus our attention on the right information.




Mani says in this posting that a human attention is the world's scarcest resource, thus focusing the attention on the right stuff has a very strong impact on what's happening. This is true in many senses, I think that in one of the many management courses I took over the years the instructor said something like --- you can do around 20% of what you plan to do, however the difference between success and failure is whether you can identify the right 20%. This is true in many areas of life, a smart student knows what is important to study in depth before the final exam, a smart physician knows which of the symptoms is important, a smart reporter knows how to identify the news item that will take him to fame, and there are many other examples.

Event processing is the basis for smart systems that can detect when it is important to attract the patient attention, in this case the role of the software is not to create more events, but to highlight existing ones, though the highlighted ones may be derived events and not raw events...

So -- focus your attention to other smart articles in the smart systems Blog. More - later.