Monday, April 14, 2008

On the spectrum of event processing applications


Back in my office and reading some of the EP Blogs. In the picture above, somebody has tried to draw the spectrum of Blogs (you may want to link to the original in order to see better). One of the last Blogs has dealt again with "simple and complex event processing" claiming that everything done so far in this area is indeed "simple event processing", while real "complex event processing" should support uncertainty and backward chaining. Several posts on this area has been posted by Greg Reemler. We don't have "CEP manifesto" that makes an official definition what is CEP and what is not, and I am not sure that this will be very useful, as it will confuse the customers even more. There is a spectrum of applications that have spectrum of functional and non-functional requirements. On my scientist hat, I am partner to a research work about "uncertainty in event processing" together with Avi Gal and our co-supervised Ph.D. student Segev Wasserkrug However, while there there are applications that require uncertainty reasoning in event processing, there are many others that don't. As I have written several times before, I am not a big fan of the term "complex event processing", due to its ambiguity - some people mean complex processing of events and some mean processing of complex (derived from more than 1) events, some people actually mean complex processing of complex events. I think that we should continue to classify applicatiosn and match the right functional and non-functional requirements to the right applications, but we'll never get to a single functional or non-functional benchmark that will cover all applications in this area. It is better to attract the energy to areas that can help most customers to deal with the problems for which they would like to apply event processing. See my previous posting on : killer applications of EP
More - later.

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