On the Semantics of Complex Events in Active Database Management Systems

Professor Rainer Unland, Erskine Visitor

University of Duisburg-Essen

Fri Mar 30 15:10:00 NZST 2007 in Room 031, MSCS

Abstract

Active database management systems have been developed for applications requiring an automatic reaction in response to certain events. Events can be simple in nature or complex. Complex events are constructed from simpler ones. Their semantics is usually described with the help of the operators of an underlying event algebra. Quite some research deals with (extensions of existing) event algebras. However, a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the semantics of complex events is still lacking. As a consequence most proposals suffer from different kinds of peculiarities. Independent aspects are not treated independently leading to confusing mixtures of aspects in operators. Aspects are not treated uniformly. Operators have other semantics than expected and so on. In this talk a general (formal) meta-model for event algebras will be presented. It permits to describe the semantics of complex events by elementary, independent dimensions. The resulting language specification fulfils the criteria for a good language design (as orthogonality, symmetry, homogeneity, lean set of language constructs) to a large extend.

Short Biography

Rainer Unland is a full professor in computer science at the Institute for Computer Science and Business Information Systems (ICB) at University of Duisburg-Essen where he heads the chair Data Management Systems and Knowledge Representation. He has authored, co-authored and edited numerous publications, journals and (text)books in the areas of non-standard/object-oriented database management systems, XML and database systems, object-oriented software development, component-based and aspect-oriented software engineering, advanced transaction management, computer supported cooperative work, (distributed) artificial intelligence, especially Multi-Agent Systems, and industrials informatics. Moreover, he has served as Chair and/or PC member for more than 100 national and international conferences, workshops, and symposia. He is co-founder of the annual International German Conference on Multi-Agent Systems Technology (MATES) and the annual International conference Netobjectdays that, as a highly successful applied conference, serves as an umbrella conference for topics related to software engineering, multi-agent system, Grid computing, and Web-Services and the Internet. Moreover, he is Editor-in-Chief of the IOS Multiagent and Grid Systems (MAGS) journal and servers on several editorial boards of other computer science related journals.