Event stream processing

Event Stream Processing, or ESP, is a technology for building and managing event-driven information systems. ESP is a related term to CEP, which is Gartner Group's term for similar technology. ESP deals with the task of processing multiple streams of event data with the goal of identifying the meaningful events within those streams, employing techniques such as detection of complex patterns of many events, event correlation and abstraction, event hierarchies, and relationships between events such as causality, membership, and timing, and event-driven processes.

ESP enables applications such as algorithmic trading in financial services, RFID event processing applications, fraud detection, and location-based services in telecomunications.

A Conceptual Description of ESP

Examples of events include church bells ringing, the appearance of a man in a tuxedo or morning suit, a girl in a flowing white gown and rice flying through the air. A complex event is what one infers from the simple events: a wedding is happening. CEP helps discover complex, inferred events by analysing and correlating other events: the bells, the man and girl in wedding gear and the rice flying through the air.

Products

The first commercial products for ESP were created by Apama and iSpheres in 1998. Streaming event databases have also emerged in the same time frame, including ObjectStore, Vhayu and KDB. In 2005, StreamBase released a "stream processing engine" engine.

See also

• Real-time computing ESP systems are typically real-time systems
• RFID Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, requires ESP

External links

• David Luckham, from Stanford University, wrote the first and most comprehensive book on CEP.
• David Luckham's CEP web site
• CEP Blog by Mark Palmer
• CEP: a start here guide and Blog by David Soul
• CEP and RFID CEP applied to RFID, appeared in RFID Journal
• CEP Communityon Yahoo!