AAAI Spring Symposium "Intelligent Event Processing", 2009

Event-based systems are now gaining increasing momentum as witnessed by current efforts in areas including event-driven architectures, business process management and modeling, Grid computing, Web services notifications, and message-oriented middleware. They become ever important in various application domains, ranging from traditional business applications, like supply-chain management, to the entertainment industry, like on-line gaming applications.

However, the current status of development is just the tip of the iceberg compared with the impact that event processing could achieve, as already reported by market research companies. Indeed, existing approaches are dealing primarily with the syntactical (but very scalable) processing of low-level signals and primitive actions, which usually goes with an inadequate treatment of the notions of time, context or concurrency (for example, synchronization). For example, some of the current event processing products are descendents of the active database research that misses efficient (formal) handling of termination, priority ordering, and confluence in rule bases.

AI and especially symbolic (for example, logic-based) approaches provide native background for the (formal) representation of the above mentioned missing concepts, enabling evolution from event processing systems into intelligent reactive systems. The work done in temporal logic, spatial reasoning, knowledge representation, ontologies, and so on enables more declarative representation of events and actions and their semantic processing. Contextual reasoning can support complex event prediction. Transactional logic can be used for ensuring the consistency between highly dependent processes in a formal way.

On the other side, the heterogeneous and highly distributed nature of event-processing systems, especially on the web, provides new challenges for AI and logics, like the contextualized reasoning over large stream data, scalable mapping of complex structures, or distributed approximate reasoning, to name but a few.