Paul Fodor

EP-SPARQL: a unified language for event processing and stream reasoning

Streams of events appear increasingly today in various Web applications such as blogs, feeds, sensor data streams, geospatial information, on-line financial data, etc. Event Processing (EP) is concerned with timely detection of compound events within streams of simple events. State-of-the-art EP provides on-the-fly analysis of event streams, but cannot combine streams with background knowledge and cannot perform reasoning tasks. On the other hand, semantic tools can effectively handle background knowledge and perform reasoning thereon, but cannot deal with rapidly changing data provided by event streams. To bridge the gap, we propose Event Processing SPARQL (EP-SPARQL) as a new language for complex events and Stream Reasoning. We provide syntax and formal semantics of the language and devise an effective execution model for the proposed formalism. The execution model is grounded on logic programming, and features effective event processing and inferencing capabilities over temporal and static knowledge. We provide an open-source prototype implementation and present a set of tests to show the usefulness and effectiveness of our approach.

Question analysis: how watson reads a clue

The first stage of processing in the IBM Watson™ system is to perform a detailed analysis of the question in order to determine what it is asking for and how best to approach answering it. Question analysis uses Watsons parsing and semantic analysis capabilities: a deep Slot Grammar parser, a named entity recognizer, a co-reference resolution component, and a relation extraction component. We apply numerous detection rules and classifiers using features from this analysis to detect critical elements of the question, including: 1) the part of the question that is a reference to the answer (the focus); 2) terms in the question that indicate what type of entity is being asked for (lexical answer types); 3) a classification of the question into one or more of several broad types; and 4) elements of the question that play particular roles that may require special handling, for example, nested subquestions that must be separately answered. We describe how these elements are detected and evaluate the impact of accurate detection on our end-to-end question-answering system accuracy.

Stream reasoning and complex event processing in ETALIS

Addressing dynamics and notifications in the Semantic Web realm has recently become an important area of research. Run time data is continuously generated by multiple social networks, sensor networks, various on-line services and so forth. How to get advantage of this continuously arriving data events remains a challenge --that is, how to integrate heterogeneous event streams, combine them with background knowledge e.g., an ontology, and perform event processing and stream reasoning. In this paper we describe ETALIS --a system which enables specification and monitoring of changes in near real time. Changes can be specified as complex event patterns, and ETALIS can detect them in real time. Moreover the system can perform reasoning over streaming events with respect to background knowledge. ETALIS implements two languages for specification of event patterns: ETALIS Language for Events, and Event Processing SPARQL. ETALIS has various applicabilities in capturing changes in semantic networks, broadcasting notifications to interested parties, and creating further changes based on processing of the temporal, static, or slowly evolving knowledge.

OpenRuleBench: an analysis of the performance of rule engines

The Semantic Web initiative has led to an upsurge of the interest in rules as a general and powerful way of processing, combining, and analyzing semantic information. Since several of the technologies underlying rule-based systems are already quite mature, it is important to understand how such systems might perform on the Web scale. OpenRuleBench is a suite of benchmarks for analyzing the performance and scalability of different rule engines. Currently the study spans five different technologies and eleven systems, but OpenRuleBench is an open community resource, and contributions from the community are welcome. In this paper, we describe the tested systems and technologies, the methodology used in testing, and analyze the results.

A rule-based language for complex event processing and reasoning

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is concerned with timely detection of complex events within multiple streams of atomic occurrences. It has useful applications in areas including financial services, mobile and sensor devices, click stream analysis etc. Numerous approaches in CEP have already been proposed in the literature. Event processing systems with a logic-based representation have attracted considerable attention as (among others reasons) they feature formal semantics and offer reasoning service. However logic-based approaches are not optimized for run-time event recognition (as they are mainly query-driven systems). In this paper, we present an expressive logic-based language for specifying and combining complex events. For this language we provide both a syntax as well as a formal declarative semantics. The language enables efficient run time event recognition and supports deductive reasoning. Execution model of the language is based on a compilation strategy into Prolog. We provide an implementation of the language, and present the performance results showing the competitiveness of our approach.

Logic Programming with Defaults and Argumentation Theories

We define logic programs with defaults and argumentation theories, a new framework that unifies most of the earlier proposals for defeasible reasoning in logic programming. We present a model-theoretic semantics and study its reducibility and well-behavior properties. We use the framework as an elegant and flexible foundation to extend and improve upon Generalized Courteous Logic Programs (GCLP) [19]--one of the popular forms of defeasible reasoning. The extensions include higher-order and object-oriented features of Hilog and F-Logic [7,21]. The improvements include much simpler, incremental reasoning algorithms and more intuitive behavior. The framework and its Courteous family instantiation were implemented as an extension to the FLORA-2 system.

ETALIS: Rule-Based Reasoning in Event Processing

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is concerned with timely detection of complex events within multiple streams of atomic occurrences, and has useful applications in areas including financial services, mobile and sensor devices, click stream analysis and so forth. In this chapter, we present ETALIS Language for Events. It is an expressive language for specifying and combining complex events. For this language we provide both a syntax as well as a clear declarative formal semantics. The execution model of the language is based on a compilation strategy into Prolog. We provide an implementation of the language, and present experimental results of our running prototype. Further on, we show how our logic rule-based approach compares with a non-logic approach in respect of performance.

REAL-TIME COMPLEX EVENT RECOGNITION AND REASONING–A LOGIC PROGRAMMING APPROACH

Complex Event Processing (CEP) deals with the analysis of streams of continuously arriving events, with the goal of identifying instances of predefined meaningful patterns (complex events). Complex events are detected in order to trigger time-critical actions in many areas, including sensors networks, financial services, transaction management, business intelligence, etc. In existing approaches to CEP, a complex event is represented as a composition of more simple events satisfying certain temporal relationships. In this article, we advocate a knowledge-rich CEP, which, apart from events, also processes additional (contextual) knowledge (e.g., in order to prove semantic relations among matched events or to define more complex situations). In particular, we present a novel approach for realizing knowledge-rich CEP, including detection of semantic relations among events and reasoning. We present a rule-based language for pattern matching over event streams, with a precise syntax and the declarative semantics. We devise an execution model for the proposed formalism, and provide a prototype implementation. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach.

Event-Driven Approach for Logic-Based Complex Event Processing

In this paper, we present a powerful logical encoding of complex event patterns into Transaction Logic programs. Complex Event Processing (CEP) deals with finding composed events and has useful applications in areas ranging from agile business and enterprise processes management, financial market applications to active Web and service oriented computation. Many systems for event processing have ad-hoc semantics with unexpected behaviors. Hence formal logical semantics is an important requirement for event-driven reactive systems. On the other hand, many logic-based approaches for CEP (based on formal semantics) fail, due to their inability to compute complex events in the data-driven fashion. Our approach enables both logic-based and data-driven complex event detection. Moreover, the proposed backward chaining approach allows for very efficient reasoning of complex events and actions triggered by these events.

Tabling for transaction logic

Transaction Logic is a logic for representing declarative and procedural knowledge in logic programming, databases, and AI. It has been successful in areas as diverse as workflows and Web services, security policies, AI planning, reasoning about actions, and more. Although a number of implementations of Transaction Logic exist, none is logically complete due to the inherent difficulty and time/space complexity of such implementations. In this paper we attack this problem by first introducing a logically complete tabling evaluation strategy for Transaction Logic and then describing a series of optimizations, which make this algorithm practical. In support of our arguments, we present a performance evaluation study of six different implementations of this algorithm, each successively adopting our optimizations. The study suggest that the tabling algorithm can scale well both in time and space. We also discuss ideas that could improve the performance further.