On events vs. data - the semantic view

I have written in the past about events vs. data, talking about the various roles that data stores can play in event processing.   recently I had a discussion in the more semantic level., about the differences between events and data.   The first distinction is that data (and also objects) do not have semantics in general, since anything can be stored in data, however event has a semantic meaning: something that happens!.    So the best comparison is to semantic data models, and in the picture above you can see the most simple (and common) semantic data model - the entity-relationship model.    As seen in this picture, entity is a term that designates some common name for individual beings that are classified to that term.   Person, department, equipment and experiment show in the picture are all entities.   None of them represent events,  since event is a different creature,  as mentioned it designates something that happens.   An event typically references entities.  For example, the event - Paul sold the bike to Peter is an event of type "sell" (if this is a general auction domain)  or "bike sell" (if this is a bicycle store domain).    In this case the event references three entities: 

• Buyer:  entity of type person
• Seller:  entity of type person
• Item:   entity of type bike

Of course, in more general case the buyer and the seller can be corporates, and the item can be of any item type.    If we look at the description as a sentence,  the entity type is represented by a noun, while the event type is represented by a verb.    Note that not all verbs represent events though,  if we look at the picture above, the relationship  "requires" is a verb that designates that an experiment requires equipment, but it is not an event,  it is a static relationship among two entities,  so verb is not a sufficient condition for event, event represents a verb that indicate that something happened.     Models like the entity relationships model should be extended to include events.    

Reviewing project for the European Commission

Dortmund, Germany.     Morning -- packing to start the way home.
In the last couple of days I have participated as a reviewer in two reviews of  EU projects which are centered around event processing -- Play (in Brussels) and Pronto (here in the fire fighters instruction center).   Play is in his first year,  building infrastructure for  "events marketplace",  Pronto in its third (and last) year, deals with events that arrive from multi-media sources, you can read some details about them on their websites.   Getting more event processing centered projects funded by government agencies is an indication of the growing importance of this area.    Got some interesting observations out of these reviews, which I'll write about later.

More on disruptive technologies

Hello from Brussels -- I'll spend the next couple of days in reviewing two EU projects, one here in Brussels and the other in Dortmund, Germany -  3.5 hours train ride from here.    


I have written about disruptive technologies before, one of my favorite topics in fact.  
Yesterday there were two events that reminded me of this, the first one was visiting Better Place, An Israeli company,  founded by Shai Agassi,  a person I met when he was still young, and got to be one of the senior leaders of SAP.   His vision is the vision of electric car, and the company, as seen in the slide above, is an infrastructure company which provides charging, automatic battery replacement and some other goodies.  They intend to start commercial use of their cars (currently they work with Renault as a manufacturer) at the end of the year,  this is indeed a disruptive technology over the current models of energy consumption in cars, and also of the leasing model of cars.     We'll see if this trend will catch.


The other event was an interview with Eitan Wertheimer,  chairman of the board of Iscar, and known Israeli industrialist, who said in that interview that whenever he launches a product, he kicks-off a team to establish a disruptive product that will make it obsolete.  This seems to go against the genetics of business -- since the goal of any business is to make money out of its products, and not try to defeat it.     His reasoning was that for every technology somebody will work on defeating it,  and it is better be us and not our competitors.  
I like this line of reasoning,  the technology world moves fast, and if one wants to be a leader, then it must lead   
new developments all the time.    


I always saw our mission in IBM Research to create disruptive technologies rather than incrementally advance existing ones, I think we are doing some of these, but not enough.   Our current project is certainly in that direction.   

Last call for EPTS awards nominations

This is a final reminder to submit nominations for the EPTS awards.
The award nominations will get to the committee in the week of April 11, thus the hard deadline for nomination submissions is  April 8, 2011.


The awards (in cooperation with the OMG event processing community of practice) will be given in two categories:   Innovative application awards  and Innovative principles award 
These awards will be given for innovative applications or research ideas in event processing.   


 This is an opportunity to get recognition for innovative work.     The submission instructions can be found in the two links above.   The competition is open to all (one does not have to be EPTS member to apply), and to customers, implementers, and researchers. 


The awards will be announced in DEBS 2011.    

More on decision model and event processing

I have written before about the "Decision Model" book, when Larry Goldberg visited us in HRL. 
I met Larry again this week in the OMG meeting, and also had dinner with him and Michael Grohs from KPI  in Cary, NC 
(I am now staying nearby in Durham -- almost packed to go start the long journey back).


From their testimony it seems that the decision model is catching quite fast, and hundreds of organizations are using it already in one way or another.  In the OMG meeting they brought their flagship customer Freddie Mac representative, who reported a big success,  there were already several vendors implementing it to be executable.   The benefit is the simplicity and riding on the "spreadsheet" table-like thinking with their methodology.    They are now working on extending the model which started with partial coverage but is evolving,  e.g. they are adding concepts of views and contexts.


Our challenge in event processing is larger, since the complexity of operations is such that I am not sure can be easily expressed in tables, but the seek for abstractions that will enable business analysts and semi-technical users to construct systems is still there.     This is one of our activity areas, which I hope to report progress at some time.   More - later.

On the Virtual event processing symposium: the EPTS use case report

Yesterday we held the EPTS virtual symposium - a kind of live webinar that was broadcast from the OMG Technical meeting in Arlington, Virginia.   This was a complex logistic operation - some of the talks were live on the site, some were live on the phone, and some recorded.  Some obstacles, but it generally worked. There were 77 remote participants and few in the room.    This is behind me and I can breathe some air  - now on a one day visit in the IBM site in RTP, North Carolina.    The EPTS meeting consisted of presentation of the event processing manifesto, that I've described before,  some discussion on standards that I'll Blog about soon, and some report of EPTS working groups.    
The first of them that has been presented was the report of the use case working group, with a first public summary of the survey results.  Pedro Bizarro posted the presentation on slideshare.
While the results reflect those who answered the survey and is not necessarily an accurate sampling of the market situation there are several interesting observations:

1. Event processing applications can be found now in multiple industries (not just financial), some of the applications were in energy and utilities, defense and aerospace, Transportation and logistics, Healthcare, manufacturing and more.
2. The most cited reason for using EP is enhance/improve user services - and this probably relates to adding functionality that was difficult to add other way, others are - cost reduction, agility (faster development) and compliance
3. Many of the applications use database/file as sources, which is more of the traditional way, other are using streaming sources like messages or subscriptions.
4. Most applications are doing various types of notifications -- only a quarter are triggering automatic actions (this is somehow related to the decision oriented observations of James Taylor that I've blogged about recently).
5. Most applications do not require high throughput ( less than 1000 events per second), around 5% of the application need more than 100K events per second -- this is an observation made before by Roy Schulte.
6. Most applications have 100 event producers or less (actually almost half have 10 event producers or less)
7. Among the non-functional properties: high availability was the biggest requirement, while security is still not a big concern 

As written - this relates just to a sample of applications and is not necessarily represent the entire market, but I think that these observations show some of the current trends.  I'll write about other sessions in the webinar later.

Decisions in smarter systems

Arlington., Virginia,  Hayatt Hotel

I am here for the OMG technical meeting.      I have participated in (part of) the decision modeling day organized by Paul Vincent and Christian De Sainte Marie.  Their ultimate goal is to get to a standard on decision modeling, and they have issued proposal for RFP on that issue.  A good survey of that day can be found in James Taylor's Blog.  I sat near James, and he is blogging in real-time.    James himself gave an interesting keynote on the 
importance of decisions  


James concentrated on operational decisions and said in many of the organizations the role of computerized systems is to provide data (in various ways) to manual decision makers when they ask for it.    The smarter systems have larger portion of automated decisions, they are active rather than passive - determine when a decision is needed, and the decisions are measurable with quantitative metrics, so they can be evaluated.  


While James did not talk explicitly about event processing,  it is obvious that it has a significant role in his vision, it has several roles:

1.  determine when a decision is needed
2.  the automated decision itself is often context dependent and  the context can be determined by event processing context mechanism (temporal, spatial, event history related...)
3. the decision itself may depend on event pattern
4. Last but not least -- the extension of event processing to proactive computing coupling with the metric that measures the decision's result can trigger decision to mitigate undesired predicted deviation from the result,(I discussed this one with James during the reception in the evening).  

The EPTS virtual symposium - tomorrow.   A lot of logistics to get it running!