EP-SPARQL: A Unified Language For Event Processing And Stream Reasoning

Abstract

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 <i>background knowledge</i> and cannot perform <i>reasoning</i> 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 <i>Event Processing SPARQL (EP-SPARQL)</i> 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.