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

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…

… 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.

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.

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).