Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Revisiting Web 2.0 and event processing


To those who like interesting numbers -- I've noticed this week that the number of my contacts in LinkedIn reached 777, it will probably not stay long, as it keeps changing. I have written before about the use of event processing in social networks, an area that I think has big potential that has not been fully explored yet. I have challenged the students in my event processing class at the Technion to select a project that is somehow related to the use of event processing in Web 2.0, and social networks in particular.
I have written before that unlike the phrase, event processing is not always about threats and opportunities. In fact, typically in Web 2.0 the use of event processing is in information dissemination - getting the right information to the right person at the right granularity in the right time. This is a case of situation awareness while the situation here is the fact that some website content has been changed, or that some activity related to social network, Blog, Wiki, and other collaborative applications happened. This can have any of the event processing functions --- filtering seems to be quite dominant, but also transformation - aggregation, translations, splitting all have a role, and of course pattern matching may also have a significant role -- example: send me update after three changes, patterns related to number of readers in a Blog (Google Analytics provides some), patterns related to activities in social networks over time and space, patterns related to tags in twitter and more... I think we'll hear much more about this topic.

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