I believe the future of CEP authoring will include some form of exploratory analysis. This can be done by either capturing a portion of a stream up front or using historical data, then working out the application step-by-step as that data is fed through the operators in the engine’s graph. Optimally, changing the parameters of any operator would cause an immediate change in a downstream table that can be inspected via multiple viewing paradigms (spreadsheet view, line graph, whatever).

As for Orange in particular: I like that they’ve got visualizations and AI-based analysis tools in their design palette. These same sorts of components would be very handy for many CEP application authors. Some techniques are easy to move to real-time streams (sampling, for instance), others would be hard or impossible (any that require the entire history to be online, for instance), but the general approach is, I think, a useful one.

Of course, I’m all in favor of real-time data in dashboards, and of allowing the end user to customize logic. But that’s not what I think of when I look at Orange…

Hans

Count me as sharing the essence of your madness too, albeit with some minor twists I would use typed first order logic where events would play the role of atomic propositions or facts, then have event processing agents define an interface defining the specific types of events (i.e. facts) to which they subscribe and the ones that they can emit. Agents would internally maintain the received events in an internal facts (i.e. event) database (one per agent). Event processing agents would be programmed using prolog-like rules interacting with the agent’s fact database only in three possible ways: adding, updating and deleting facts. There would be also a primitive to emit a fact (i.e. an event) to the environment. That would be all. I like this programming model for event processing, it has some nice properties, for instance event types are “just” typed first order sentences with variables whose instances are all those facts (i.e. events) that make the sentence come true,…

Regards,
PatternStorm