OTM 2009 - LNCS 5870-5872 CD-ROM

Semantic Event Correlation Using Ontologies

Thomas Moser¹, Heinz Roth², Szabolcs Rozsnyai³, Richard Mordinyi¹, and Stefan Biffl¹

¹Complex Systems Design & Engineering Lab, Vienna University of Technology
thomas.moser@tuwien.ac.at
richard.mordinyi@tuwien.ac.at
stefan.biffl@tuwien.ac.at

²Secure Business Austria, A-1040 Vienna
roth@securityresearch.at

³UC4 SENACTIVE Software GmbH, A-3012 Wolfsgraben
szabolcs.rozsnyai@senactive.com

Abstract. Complex event processing (CEP) is a software architecture paradigm that aims at low latency, high throughput, and quick adaptability of applications for supporting and improving event-driven business processes. Events sensed in real time are the basic information units on which CEP applications operate and react in self-contained decision cycles based on defined processing logic and rules. Event correlation is necessary to relate events gathered from various sources for detecting patterns and situations of interest in the business context. Unfortunately, event correlation has been limited to syntactically identical attribute values instead of addressing semantically equivalent attribute meanings. Semantic equivalence is particularly relevant if events come from organizations that use different terminologies for common concepts.

In this paper, we introduce an approach that uses semantic technologies, in our case ontologies, for the definition of event correlations to facilitate semantic event correlation derived from semantic equivalence, inherited meaning, and relationships between different terms or entities. We evaluate the practical application of three types of semantic correlation based on use cases that are relevant to the real-world domain of industrial production automation. Major results of the evaluation show that semantic correlation enables functions for CEP that traditional syntactic correlation does not allow at all.

Keywords: Complex event processing, semantic event correlation, ontology

LNCS 5871, p. 1087 ff.

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