The BTM Blog

A surprisingly interesting question; are we talking about a) the processing of complex events or b) the complex processing of events? Both possibilities lead to interesting follow on questions such as what is a complex event? or what constitutes complex processing of events? This has been a source of much discussion within the event processing community and rather than present the argument in this post, I’d like to present the outcome of the discussion.

Recently, David Luckham and Roy Schulte produced an event processing glossary which defines complex event processing as the processing of complex events, and defines a complex event as an event that contains other events (known as it’s members).

Of course, the members of one complex event can be other complex events, leading to a hierarchical tree (or even graph!) structure of nested events. The processing of complex events can consist of tasks such as aggregating a set of events into a new event; deriving events from other events; filtering events based on their arbitrarily deeply nested members and so on – a rich paradigm indeed!

Obviously this hierarchy of events must start somewhere; with simple events that do not have other members. According to the event processing glossary, these simple events can be used to represent anything that happens or is perceived as happening. Starting with source events a powerful complex event processing network can be built which uses tasks such as aggregation to build intelligent models of business processes in an organisation.

One of the first tasks of the newly formed Event Processing Technical Society when they meet, will be to produce an event processing glossary which will hopefully become an industry standard. We look forward to seeing what they come up with!