At DEBS last week, the EPTS Language and Use Case working groups presented tutorials, and the EPTS Reference Architecture group (co-chaired by TIBCO) met for a useful catch-up session. But sorely missed were the “Glossary-ers”, tasked with standardizing the terminology used in event processing applications and systems. The importance of this came to light when a discussion started up about whether “incidents” were events (which of course they are, although they may not be detectable at the time they occur). Opher Etzion (from IBM Research) covered some more of this in his discussion on the Use Case tutorial.
Interestingly, there is a whole ITIL section on the process of Incident Management, which seems yet another application area for Complex Event Processing (at least for the detection part: other aspects may also include decision management and process management).
Other observations from DEBS were that:
- Compared to previous years, there was much more focus on event processing rather than the (possibly simpler, probably more established) aspects of pub-sub middleware.
- ACM accreditation seems to have done the conference no harm, and indeed seems to have made the organisers’ lives easier.
- There was little in the way of progress to standards, with no or little mention of PRR or RIF; at least the Siemens CEP team were progressing on an interesting project using BMM, and were interested in the proposed EMP. The latter is awaiting more interest, including that likely to result from a supposedly planned link-up between the EPTS and OMG…
- Was it just me, or did there seem to be a dominance of attendees (and presenters) from Germany? Is the land of “Vorsprung durch Technik” stealing a lead in IT by recognizing the advantages of event processing over conventional data processing?
Next year DEBS’10 moves back to Europe to the tranquil quads (and incorrect punting technique) of Cambridge University. Attendees can probably look forward to cries of “Ich habe sich in den Fluss!” or somesuch…
