Dear all, As you know, one of the action points from our last confcall had to do with providing a tentative definition of basic concepts in our chapter like data, context and event. Please find the document I have produced on the matter at: https://forge.fi-ware.eu/docman/view.php/9/141/Notes+and+Thoughts+on+definition+of+data-context-event.doc Just in case you believe it would be more easy to run a discussion via email following this email, I have attached the text of this document below. Hope you find it useful. Your feedback is welcome. Best regards, -- Juanjo 1. Motivation This document intends to provide a precise description of some basic concepts like data, context and events in FI-WARE. These concepts are fundamental in the description of the Data/Context Management platform in FI-WARE and the way applications are developed based on that platform. Contents of this document will be considered as baseline for a post to publish in our Data/Context Management blog in www.fi-ware.eu<http://www.fi-ware.eu> (http://data.fi-ware.eu) 2. Definition of Data Data refers to information that is produced, generated, collected or observed that may be of relevance for processing, further analysis or information and knowledge generation. Essentially refers to information relevant to applications. Data in FI-WARE has associated a data type and a value. FI-WARE will support a set of built-in basic data types like in most programming languages. Values linked to these basic data types supported in FI-WARE are referred as basic data values. So we have the notion of the integer basic data type and basic values like '2', '7' or '365' that belong to the integer basic data type. A data element refers to data whose value is defined as a sequence of one or more <name, type, value> triplets referred as data element attributes, where the type and value of each attribute is either linked to a basic data type and a basic value or is linked to the data type and value of another data element. Note that each data element has an associated data type as any data in the system. This data type determines what concrete sequence of attributes characterizes that data element. There may be meta-data (also referred as semantic data) linked to attributes in a data element. However, existence of meta-data linked to a data element attribute is optional. Any data element has an entity in any FI-WARE Instance and, as such, it has an associated EntityId which universally and unequivocally indentifies the data element among the whole set of existing data elements. The basic concepts introduced so far are represented in Figure 1. [cid:part1.03010906.08070301 at tid.es] Figure 1. Basic Model for Data A cornerstone concept in FI-WARE is that data elements are not tied to a specific format. They can be transferred as an XML document or in some sort of efficient binary representation and then be stored in a Relational Database or as entries in a noSQL data base like MongoDB. 3. Definition of Context Context in FI-WARE is represented through context elements. A context element is just a particular case of data element. However, there may be some attributes as well as meta-data associated to attributes that we may define as mandatory for any type of context element in FI-WARE. 4. Definition of Event An event is an occurrence within a particular system or domain; it is something that has happened, or is contemplated as having happened in that domain. The word event object is used to mean a programming entity that represents such an occurrence (event) in a computing system [EPIA]. Events are represented as event objects within computing systems to distinguish them from other types of objects and to perform operations on them, also known as event processing. It is common to refer to event objects simply as events. In FI-WARE, event objects are defined as a data element to which a number of standard event object properties (similar to a header) are associated. The concrete set of standard event object properties in FI-WARE is still to be defined but we may anticipate that one of these properties would be the time at which the event object was created. The data element and the standard properties linked to an event are used to describe, as mentioned above, something that has happened or is contemplated as having happened in a given domain. A context event The relationship (or difference) of the terms data and event is continuously debated. One summary of the philosophical and technical aspects of such debates is included in the background section of [Grove 06] with several references to the different opinions and definitions. For the purpose of FI-WARE and in specifically of the Context and Data Management Generic Enablers, we need to distinguish between the semantic level and the technical level of such a relationship that FI-WARE wishes to adopt, communicate, through its interfaces, and implement. Semantically speaking, the term data subsumes the term event meaning that some data can be semantically interpreted as events. From a technical perspective data is the way information is communicated in FI-WARE and it needs to be explicitly or implicitly identified as an event object and vice versa for processing the data as event. ________________________________ Este mensaje se dirige exclusivamente a su destinatario. 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