Event standards? The Event Ontology and Events-ML
Posted by Paul Vincent
Reading a paper from last year’s Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2009) academic conference, I came across some references to various “event standards”. All of these were very domain specific, but 2 seemed they might have more generic uses.
One was Events-ML G2 from the International Press Telecommunications Council for registering “events as in conferences, meetings etc” (rather than the sorts of events the CEP world is mainly interested in). The event schema therefore includes properties such as phone and contact details, implicitly recording the observer’s data on the event (as opposed to some observer identifier from which that and other data could be gleaned, presumably). On the other hand they did have a nice test form!).
Event in Event Ontology
There was also an “Event Ontology” defined as part of a Music Ontology (!) project. Things started well when the authors stated:
This ontology is centered around the notion of event, seen here as the way by which cognitive agents classify arbitrary time/space regions, which is essentially the view expressed by Allen and Fergusson [or its HTML version via Google].
The next quote was less impressive though, seemingly going beyond abstraction and on into the realm of philosophy…
[..] events are primarily linguistic or cognitive in nature. That is, the world does not really contain events. Rather, events are the way by which agents classify certain useful and relevant patterns of change.
Reviewing their definition of event we see relationships between event and:
- place and time
- factors and products
- agents (acting on the events)
Presumably from the musician’s point of view, a set of notes (as events) may combine into a musical chord (an event product) - or in other words, agents combine events and context (”factors”) to define complex events (”products”). So not a million miles away from the EPTS’ labors on the EPTS Glossary, newly refreshed in a draft version 2…
Tags: EPTS, Events-ML, ontology
Complex Event Processing (CEP), Event notation, Standards, models | 12 February 2010 |
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By Marco Seiriö, February 12, 2010 @ 08:31
To wait for event standards, real standards, to emerge might be a long wait. I think the best idea would be that you bigger guys just define a “standard” and try to agree on some common ground. I think everybody else will follow if you manage to create an event standard that is more or less vendor or product neutral.
My take on this would be to go for simplicity. There’s no chance for anything complex to make it. But something simple so that we could at least solve 80% of the interoperability puzzle. When we can’t even exchange things like simple orders, basic customer info or a stock tick between different products its hurting all CEP vendors to some degree. Just look what happened to the db market when SQL came.
By Paul Vincent, February 12, 2010 @ 13:06
Hi Marco - the alternative viewpoint is “why”? What sort of “event standard” is needed? We already in IT have standards like JMS (messages that represent events). The ontology idea is a good one, with an associated metamodel (for UML use), but then the OMG Event Metamodel and Profile has not progressed yet…
In terms of exchanging “customer” and “order” data (… as event payloads), these are more domain standard from things like Rosettanet, XBRL, ACORD, MISMO, etc etc. Getting that lot to agree is something even the W3C has not tackled yet (and instead they copped out by specifying RDF
)…
Probably we will need to do a basic event metamodel under EPTS (as per the Metamodel Working Group charter, and with yourself at Rulecore, the guys at IBM and Oracle, Progress and Sybase, etc) as it shouldn’t be too difficult… (famous last words) then standardise it at OASIS (for simplicity), then W3C (for wider adoption) and OMG (for UML model version)… and if I get 5 end-users who want this done, I will be amazed!
Cheers
By Marco Seiriö, February 13, 2010 @ 01:59
I think the short answer to ‘why?’ is the same reason that customers want databases that do SQL. Before SQL, there seems not been any demand for standards. But as SQL started to gain traction, it seems that most people realised that it would be a good idea to use SQL even though they had not demanded it from their vendor. I think other areas have the same store. More recently in the Java world every app server is sticking to the same standard because that what customer want even though they were happily building web apps using ‘non standard’ ways in the past. I’m sure there are other examples that you can point at where vendors are sticking to a common base leads to bigger overall market and happier customers.
By Raphaël Troncy, February 20, 2010 @ 02:13
You might want to have a read at the following paper:
Ryan Shaw, Raphaël Troncy and Lynda Hardman. LODE: Linking Open Descriptions of Events. In 4th Annual Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC’09), vol. LNCS 5926, pages 153-167, Shanghai, China, December 6-9, 2009, http://www.cwi.nl/~troncy/Publications/Troncy_Shaw-aswc09.pdf which compares numerous Event ontologies including EventsML-G2, F, the MO event ontology and other models.
You might also want to have a look at these slides: http://www.slideshare.net/troncy/lode-linking-open-descriptions-of-events-aswc-2009
The Event Ontology LODE is a set of axioms that ensures interoperability between all these models. It is available at http://linkedevents.org/ontology/ and you can start to browse events in the Web of Data at http://linkedevents.org/
By Paul Vincent, February 22, 2010 @ 03:38
Thanks Raphael - a nice paper: congratulations to your team. This sort of metamodel is very interesting to relate information theory and events - please keep us updated on progress on LODE.
Cheers
By Brian Ulicny, May 27, 2011 @ 05:36
Basic Formal Ontology (http://www.ifomis.org/bfo/home) deals extensively with events and has a deep philosophical provenance. There is an extensive set of ontologies developed within that framework.
At VIStology, we have played with both EventsML and BFO, particularly in the form of UCORE-SL, based on a DoD standard for describing military Events and Entities (the two top level entities). EventsML is definitely more oriented toward news (and newsroom) events. Hopefully, we will soon see news text actually marked up with EventsML, which would be interesting.
By Paul Vincent, May 30, 2011 @ 02:18
Thanks Brian - would be interesting if your work is leading to the use / discovery of interesting events in IT systems.