Event Processing

Motivation

Event Processing is an emerging area. It started over a decade ago with a collection of research projects in various places. It is now getting into the main stream of enterprise software with applications in variety of industries and products by major software vendors and many start-up companies around the world. The academic roots of event processing originate in multiple disciplines: artificial intelligence, databases, simulation, verification, sensor handling, distributed computing, programming languages, business process management and more. Yet, we are witnessing the birth of new discipline, dedicated to specific issues of event processing with substantial breadth and depth of topics.

In May 2007 we organized the 1st Dagstuhl Seminar on "Event Processing" which brought together people from many related disciplines, from both academia and industry, in many countries. Since that time there has been progress in the establishment of event processing as a discipline. The conference "Distributed Event-Based Systems" (DEBS) has been extended and recognized as the "flagship" conference of the community; it has also been recognized as an ACM conference. The EPTS (Event Processing Technical Society) was launched in June 2008 as a consortium that includes all vendors, some of the relevant academic community, analysts, and customers. EPTS is intended to promote the understanding of the event processing discipline, incubate standards, and foster collaboration between industry and academia.

The 2010 Dagstuhl seminar is intended to be task-oriented, and be focused on a joint effort between the academic participants and the industrial participants (vendors, customers, analysts). The output of the seminar will be a manifesto for the event processing discipline and will contain topics such as:

• What are the current trends?
• What are the big challenges?
• What the research community should do in order to advance the state of the practice?
• What are the boundaries and synergies with other areas?
• What are the truly fundamental issues? Is there a theory of event processing? If so, how is it related to other theories and other fundamental concepts? What are the similarities in event processing in diverse areas such as discrete-event simulation, graphics and user interfaces, concurrent computing, databases, event-condition-action systems, and so on?