Semantics | The TIBCO Blog

Towards a comprehensive Date Time Vocabulary / Ontology

March 22, 2011 by Paul Vincent 3 Comments

datetime Very impressive work, by a team led by Mark Linehan of IBM Research, on Date Time was presented by NIST’s Ed Barkmeyer at OMG this week. This is a “work in progress” for likely completion later this year but clearly could play an important role in temporal operations in event processing.

To quote from the latest draft, the objectives of this work are:

1. Provide a Standard Business Vocabulary for Date and Time Concepts. Provide a vocabulary of date and time concepts that business users can share and exploit in their business domain vocabularies and rules…
2. Support Machine Reasoning about Time. Provide a formal ontology that enables machine interpretation and reasoning…
3. Enable implementation…

It covers a time infrastructure (intervals, Allen Relations, durations and SBVR “states of affairs” such as events and situations), organizing time in calendars, “indexical time concepts” such as the meaning of “now” etc in a business context, and so forth. Indeed it seems the only thing NOT covered are the ad hoc adjustments of “leap seconds” to a “year” that are made every now again. And there are versions for UML, SBVR and CLIF, and plans an ODM / OWL version.

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP) Tagged With: OMG, Semantics, Standards, UML

Semantic Web vs the Real World

November 22, 2010 by Paul Vincent Leave a Comment

Just saw some news on Sir Tim Berners-Lee making the case against “closed web solutions” like Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Apple. Basically these companies take your data and use it for your and their own purposes. As opposed to the W3C‘s semantic web ideal of having all data available for all to use as needed. Of course, this is where the idealistic “semantic web” was always doomed: data and information has value and therefore is not going to be made freely available, especially where the value of the collecting application is in the use of said data (e.g. Facebook). On the other hand there is much to agree with in this essay – it should be compulsory reading for politicians considering meddling with the internet.

Meanwhile, the value of “semantics” and “web” as separate entities continue to be recognised by most of us. And on the former topic, I see the CallForPapers covering “realtime and continuous semantics”, “rules”, “reasoning and inference” and so forth is up on the 2011 Semantic Technology Conference site. I wonder if organisor Tony Shaw will get some “Semantic CEP” submissions – whether from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or anyone else…

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Scientific American, Semantics, SemTech, W3C

Do “events” have “durations”?

September 7, 2010 by Paul Vincent 18 Comments

This might seem an odd question, but there are 2 schools of thought here:

An event is a point in time.
An event is an activity that can take a period of time.

Taking the latter view, we can say things like:

Earthquake MMM took place from date-time D1 to date-time D2
Fraudulant act on account NNN took place from date-time D3 to date-time D4
Flight QQ123 was delayed in the period date-time D3 to date-time D4, when it completed disembarkation time T1 late
World War 2, an historical event, took place from 1 September 1939 to 2 September 1945.

The problem with this view is that activities, and therefore processes, can therefore be viewed as “events”, which in IT terms can lead to confusion and generalisation. And what about “historical events” like World War 2, which definitely have a duration. But in reality “world war” was a “state” the various nations affected found themselves entangled in – for sure it had a start event (invasion of Poland) and an end event (surrender of Japan), and many many events in between. And indeed many many “predictor events” (or even “causal events”) beforehand.

In event processing terms, we want to predict certain events – when will Earthquake MMM start, and with what strength? – as well as states – Flight QQ123 is now in a “delayed” state. In effect, in the real world, we are concerned not just with event patterns, but also state management and processing. Passengers might not care about the events that lead to their flight being delayed, but they may certainly care about being delayed!

The EPTS Glossary specifies events as points in time as “instantaneous events”. From the EPTS perspective, the 1929 Stock Market Crash was a complex event. At the time it was a “crashing state” for the Wall Street markets – within a period of instability, local rises interspersed with sharp falls. Top-to-bottom, the period covered Sept 1929 to July 1932, and an overall 89% decline in the Dow.

So perhaps History should be formalised, as a science, using event terminology?

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP) Tagged With: EPTS glossary, models, Semantics, State

SCEP, or Semantic CEP – presentation from SemTech2010

July 27, 2010 by Paul Vincent Leave a Comment

Prof. Adrian Paschke has posted the presentation made by himself, Prof. Harold Boley and myself on Semantic Complex Event Processing at SemTech this year (previously blogged about here and here) – and makes an interesting comparison with a prior public presentation in this area 2 years ago. Semantics in CEP were also one of the research topics at DEBS this year, too…

UPDATE: I’ve had a few requests for non-slideshare versions – so here is the PDF .

Semantic Complex Event Processing at Sem Tech 2010

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP) Tagged With: Meetings and events, SCEP, Semantics, SemTech

SemTech2010: Panel on Semantic CEP

June 24, 2010 by Paul Vincent Leave a Comment

Elisa Kendall from Sandpiper and Dr Mohammad Ketabchi from Progress were my honorable partners on the Semantic CEP Panel at SemTech today. Q&A covered some interesting questions:

- isn’t the event pattern – decision – reaction view too simplistic?

This was complaint about the “simplified view of the world” slide I presented. Of course, being “simplified” it did not cover, for example, possible multiple levels of abstraction or feedback loops, while learning and update mechanisms are certainly still applicable.

- managing explosion of outgoing events – won’t reaction events potentially overwhelm an event bus?

Usually CEP is “reducing” numbers of simple events (observations etc) into a fewer number of complex / business events – so while this could be a problem, it tends not to be in most practical applications and/or can be managed through the middleware layer.

- what next for financial event processing?

Increased regulatory compliance rules will be applied to more financial operations and transactions by both banking and government agencies… probably a growth area for CEP technologies!

- surely semantic is not just limited to “static” ontology definitions – consider for example ontologies of actions and events?

This was against in introductory slide showing semantic community focus with the “FOAF” type logical relationships – good for text search problems and such, but less so for business operations and behavior – processes and services… Elisa also commented that dynamic classification was certainly a semantics capability, but was more a research topic in “government applications” rather than a productised capability right now.

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP) Tagged With: Meetings and events, Semantics, SemTech

SemTech2010: its all in the meaning

June 24, 2010 by Paul Vincent 3 Comments

I was reminded of the importance of semantics at the coffee break at this morning’s Semantic Technology Conference when I watched a fellow attendee nearly succeed in unscrewing the tap on the coffee urn (instead of simply pulling the tap). Meaning is everything. Meanwhile, Harold Boley, Adrian Paschke and myself are presenting this afternoon on the possibilities of Semantic CEP. This morning 2 of the W3C RIF co-chairs presented on the W3C Rule Interchange Format and other rule standards, to a good crowd that seemed at least 10x in number compared to the related OMG event earlier this week.

I’ve only had a brief wander around the exhibition hall here; some of the ontologists involved in “government projects” mentioned that good use was being madein those projects of TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP technology. I’m not convinced the semantics world is ready to wake up to “events” and “event processing” yet though (with a few honorable exceptions). I guess we’ll find out later

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP) Tagged With: Meetings and events, Semantics, SemTech

Transactional JVM in CEP?

April 26, 2010 by Paul Vincent 2 Comments

Another interesting TIBCO technology acquisition with potential side effects for high performance event-processing: the Kabira transactional JVM has joined the TIBCO team. This provides a JVM (called Fluency) that has built-in (to quote the developer guide):
• Transactions
• Distribution
• Shared Memory Persistence
• Keys and Queries
• High Availability
• Replication

Transactional integrity is of course orthogonal to event processing: some event processes, especially those that impact multiple services and processes, need a transactional context. In complex event processing, identifying complex events is rarely “transactional” per se, but could depend on some state / include some transactional context. And of course, the business process associated with a complex event may well need to be a transaction…

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP) Tagged With: Fluency, Kabira, Semantics, transactions

Semantic Technology Conference 2010… or not

April 15, 2010 by Paul Vincent 2 Comments

… does not, at first glance, have any event processing content. This is unsurprising as most IT folk associate “semantics” with ontologies and the “semantic web”, where the latter is a hugely successful initiative (provided you are an academic researcher or a W3C standard). This success cumulated recently with… yet more government funding (a “Web Science” research institute whose unconventional funding by the UK government apparently raised a few eyebrows).

The Semantic Technology Conference has been growing successfully year on year due to the potential of better semantics in information processing, and probably through being one of the better organised commercial conferences. And a convergence (or collision, depending on your point of view) with the commercial world with the semantic community may not be too far off. Consider, for example:

the promise of RDF (and associated RDFS and SPARQL) tuple stores for agile data handling, which is but a hair’s width from a commercial, internet-based tuple storage technology like TIBCO ActiveSpaces…
the promise of declarative logics being applied to information processing, which is but a hair’s width (OK, maybe a small path’s width then) from commercial declarative rules engines like TIBCO BusinessEvents…

Although the RDF/ontology/semantics community is mostly avoiding the event / temporal viewpoint, there is a corner of a corner of Sem Tech that will be well represented by the CEP community. A track within the overall conference is on Rules, and one such session here is described as “Semantic Rules in the Dynamic IT Infrastructure” with short sessions from Sandpiper (known for semantic CEP), TIBCO and the RuleML team (on reactive rules, CEP and Streaming Knowledge), and a panel with Opher Etzion (EPTS Chair) and Jeff Palmer “formerly of Streambase” (who I don’t believe I’ve met…) [see comments].

SemTech takes place on June 21-25 in San Francisco, USA, with the aforementioned Semantic Rules sesion on Thurs 24th at 6pm.

UPDATE: oops looks like the schedule changed / got updated.

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP) Tagged With: Meetings and events, Semantics, STC

Semantic CEP: the relevance of PRR and ODM

April 4, 2009 by Paul Vincent Leave a Comment

The Semantic Technology Information Day at the last OMG meeting included a short spiel on Complex Event Processing, relevant semantic models for CEP, and some of the appropriate standards (ODM or Ontology Definition Metamodel, and PRR or Production Rule Representation).

The talks were much more interesting than one would expect from a seminar containing the word “Semantics” in the title (especially for those used to dry, academic claims from the Semantic Web community). For example, Chris Welty of IBM (also co-chair of the W3C RIF effort) started the proceedings with an actually interesting and relevant talk on the role of semantics and knowledge in information systems; the other interesting talks included, for example, the complexities of healthcare ontologies. Presentations will eventually be up on the OMG site.

The main way semantic models like OWL can influence the IT models of CEP is via ODM, mapping ontologies to UML Class and Event and their related and dependent behaviors (State, PRR, etc). In addition, run-time semantic models can potentially assist with things like text analytics.

The CEP presentation can be found here.

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP) Tagged With: Meetings and events, Semantics

Business models of business events

March 28, 2009 by Paul Vincent Leave a Comment

Last week’s OMG standards meeting included an interesting presentation by John Hall of Model Systems (and SSADM fame) on the role of (business) events in linking business (policy-type) rules to business processes. John normally deals with business modeling artifacts like OMG BMM and OMG SBVR, so it was interesting to see how this community sees “business events” as being the key glue between “business rules” and “business processes” – something that Ron Ross has also been advocating [*1].

Now, neither BMM nor SBVR are particularly “event-aware” standards, and the goal for SBVR pundits is to exploit such business rules to determine the content of (and ensure enforcement within) business processes (as defined in models like BPMN). John’s presentation was basically how “events” linked policy-type business rules to business processes (in BPMN). Interestingly John proposed analyzing the available terms and facts for appropriate events (as in “new”, “update”, “delete” etc) through a cross-reference table. Compared to event processing IT systems:

the observable business events tend to be what is already on the event bus, and are very much a subset of all possible CRUD operations on all available business concepts
complex events often align to interesting “business facts”, and CEP is about determining, from some prior sequence of other events, when these business events occur (or will occur).

Hopefully this will be the start of business modelling of abstract events to help join the business rule documenters with the business rule automators – and its my opinion that event-driven rule-based systems are probably going to prove the easiest to join this gap.

Notes:

[1] This is an interesting Lithuanian paper that looks at rules in UML from both an SBVR and IT perspective. Note the mention of state models, production rules and events – which should be familiar to any user of TIBCO BusinessEvents (although as existing COTS prior art this didn’t warrant a reference in the paper).

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP) Tagged With: Event notation, Meetings and events, Rules, Semantics, Standards

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