On When vs. Where

Thanks to Harold Ship, I came across a post by Bill Lee entitled "Investing in 2013: It's about time not location".  Lee claims that while there have been much traction around location based solutions,  the location by itself has less value that the time of occurrence of past or future events.  In the figure above, it might be more interesting WHEN Achilles is going to bypass the tortoise than where it is going to happen.  Saying that a traffic congestion is going to occur at a certain location might be meaningless without prediction about the timing of the traffic congestion.   It is more valuable to know when the delayed aircraft is going to land than just to know where it is now, it is more valuable to know when the technician is expected to arrive than just to know where he is now.  I don't really care where the guy who delivers my pizza is now, but I definitely want to know when he is going to arrive.   Lee claims that in the USA alone businesses lose $90 Billion annually due to people running late, whether it is the employee, or the technician for whom the employee waits at home.   The claim is that time-based services is a good topic for 2013 investors to pursue, whether location is involved (spatiotemporal capabilities) or not.   As the timing of these time-based services is associated with current or predicted events,  event processing is a key for such services.  I'll write more on time-based services later.

Recent paper about spatiotemporal event processing

Recently we see more work on spatiotemporal event processing.  I came across a recent paper, authored by

Foued Barnouni and Bernard Moulin from Laval University which deals with spatiotemporal event patterns. 

The generic form of a spatiotemporal pattern is shown in the figure below,  first the temporal relation is evaluated and then the spatial relation, where the spatial patterns can be of three types: distance, topology and direction.  The model also supports qualitative pattern such as "far", "near",  "very near"  enables the definition of fuzzy qualifiers in a pattern.   The paper provides good overview of the spatiotemporal event processing topic, as well as a specific model implemented by a combination of TreeSap, a qualitative reasoning GIS system,  and the event processing part is implemented in Esper. 

SpatialRules

Sometimes I am getting notifications that reveal players in the event processing space that I was not aware of,  the one I've discovered today is SpatialRules by ObjectFX.   From the description on the website it is difficult to understand the exact capabilities of this product which is described as CEP for geospatial data. It seems that it support tracking events that relate to spatial objects - entering, exiting, are inside/outside/close to areas, with also some spatiotemporal capabilities.    It seems that this product is not new,  but I must admit it is new to me, maybe recognized in the GIS community.    I've written before about spatiotemporal event processing capabilities in event processing products such as: Microsoft StreamInsight or Oracle CEP.   ObjectFX seems to come from the other direction,  instead of extending event processing to have spatiotemporal capabilities, it extends spatial platform (ObjectFX has other spatial oriented products) to event processing.  It will be interesting to see whether the two approaches meet.  

On spatiotemporal event processing

In the EPIA book we referred to the spatial dimension of context, and also to spatial patterns of events, there is also a paper on this topic that I've written last year with Nir Zolotorevsky,   There are also combination of the spatial and temporal perspectives,  both in sense of composite contexts,  and also spatiotemporal patterns 
(such as:  going north). 


It seems that spatiotemporal event processing is becoming popular.  Alex Alves from Oracle presented a paper  about it in  the industrial track of DEBS'11, and also recently wrote a short posting about it in his Blog;
Seems that Oracle is putting a support of spatiotemporal features in its product.


I also came across some description of spatiotemporal processing within Microsoft StreamInsight,  


The current support in spatiotemporal capabilities is quite elementary, and various extensions are possible (a student project for the  next semester?). It will be interesting to see more about applications that utilize the spatiotemporal capabilities, and their functional requirements.