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…

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 .

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.

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