On our proposed EU project - Take I

CDG Airport, Paris.

This is, more or less, how the A3 road in Paris has looked like today when I was on my way to CDG airport, when I asked the taxi driver how long it will take to the airport he said - no more than 40 minutes, well it took 2 hours, and could have taken more, unless at some point he lost his patient, drove through the next exit, and navigated with his GPS through some small streets
to get to the airport from a different direction. Since the price of the taxi is a function not only of distance but of time also, then the price also exceeded (by far) his estimate... This was not the only traffic related event. My airline sent me SMS to notify me that my flight home has been cancelled and they re-booked me on the next flight 2 hours later (that's why I was not pressed of the long trip to the airport). They sent me the SMS in French, while I was sitting in a train, and the passenger sitting opposite to me was kind enough to translate me, 5 minutes later they re-sent me the same SMS, this time in Hebrew.

I ended the day in visiting ILOG, acquired by IBM, and before that in the morning, together with some of our partners, we had a meeting with the EU commission in Brussels, about a proposed EU project. This is planned to be a relatively big project that will look at the future web services infrastructure which will be event-driven, and include event-enabled BPM. . We got good and useful feedback, and have a lot of action items, like finalizing the consortium. I'll write more about it in the next few months.

On Virtual Events

The glossary defines event as something that happens, it also has some escapte to talk about virtual events that is: an event that does not happen in the physical world but appears to signify a real world event; an event that is imagined or modeled or simulated

Which leads to the question- when we are processing events, is there a place to process events that don't really happen in the physical world - well, today that people have second life in a virtual reality, and there are some events in this reality that worth processing, this is an example of a virtual event, but there are some other examples -- when event processing is used in a simulated mode, the simulated event also does not happen in the physical world, if an event is predicted it has not happened (yet?) in the physical world and there are some other examples. The question is -- what is the difference between event and virtual event ? are the boundaries even clear ? - in the meta-physical world the answer is YES, an even either occurs or does not occur (following the law of excluded middle), however, in reality we may have uncertain events, thus, when processing this event we don't really know if it is a real event or a virtual event. In previous posts I have started to talk about the importance of context and this is the key to handle these events - an event happens within a context. The context may be physical deterministic world, virtual world, physical stochastic world, simulated world, predicted world etc - and the event happen within this context. The type of processing for these events is the same, so something that is real in one context may be virtual in another context and vice-versa.

Furthermore, something that may be considered as an important event in one context For example:

the event that the Dow Jones is up by 5 percent is an exciting event for some people, and a non-event to the fisherman on the Pacific island beach who does not even know what Dow Jones is, but for him the capture of a fish that weighs 100 KG is a big event, and the broker in Wall Street is not excited from such an event, thus - the question whether something deserves to be called "event" is also a question of context. I'll get to a more formal definition of context in the next posting.

Preparing for unexcepected events - pickpocket

Today I have experienced an unexpected event - I have been most likely pick pocketed while unloading to the car bags from shopping at the supermarket. When I noticed it - it was too late, the wallet was gone. It will take me some time and effort to reconstruct its content - had to cancel credit cards, get substitute for driving license, get new identity card, and some other less important cards as well. Event processing can help in this case -- first locating chip attached to driving license, credit cards etc - can help locate them (for the privacy fans - this will also let some big brother trace you), some automatic procedure to replace everything that has been there, without bothering me - would also been helpful. This bring the question of cost-effectiveness - the investment in handling relatively rare events which have a noticeable overhead vs. resolution when they do happen - this is a utility function which weights the cost, other damages, and the damage from the event that happens - an interesting investigation area - which also has practical impact on applying event processing in business situations -- which events should be traced and handled, and which not.

And since the tone of this blog is personal this time, I would like also to write a few lines about a good friend and colleague - Shlomit Zak - who unfortunately passed away recently in relatively young age. Many of the foundations of the work I have done over the years came from my joint work with Shlomit in the Israel Air-Force, many years ago, Shlomit has been one of the brightest persons I know, who, unfortunately did not come close to fulfill her potential; besides her professional abilities she has has an artistic soul, was gifted piano player, and keen sense of humor, and was famous by writing achrosticons. My last Email from her was two months ago when she sent me an Email "happy new year" card with achrosticon - and I have replied : "happy new year to you too - the achrosticon is nice, as usual; rhyming is mostly reasonable", and got the answer "and you - as usual, cannot free yourself from the need to provide grades" (well in Hebrew it sound better...).