[Fiware-data] Revised description of basic concepts: data elements, context elements and events

Guy Sharon GUYSH at il.ibm.com
Fri Jun 17 06:31:11 CEST 2011


I disagree with some of the comments Boris has on events. In particular...
"An event is a particular case of the context element that does not have 
the EntityId and EntityType components"
Why tie it to context - an event can stand on its own! - you may want to 
refer to the meaning of the event as some contextual information but it is 
not a must.
I think we can live without this sentence
We need to distinguish how we identify events vs. how we deal with events. 
The processing doesnt care how you identified an event from the origin 
(data element).
I therefore think that we shouldnt event mention any context in the event 
definition section.
The data elements can be identified as events if.... , the data element 
can be identified as context if... - sometimes the data element can be 
identified as both - thats all.
Please see my comments here...

Once we agree on the content I offer to go through this for correcting the 
English (and there will be a lot there)

Guy Sharon
Manager
Event-based Middleware & Solutions Group


Event-based Middleware & Solutions

phone : 
+972 4 8296587
mobile : 
+972 54 6976417
address : 
IBM R&D Labs in Israel, Haifa University Campus, Mount Carmel, Haifa, 
31905, Israel
email : 
guysh at il.ibm.com




From:   Moltchanov Boris <boris.moltchanov at telecomitalia.it>
To:     Juanjo Hierro <jhierro at tid.es>, "fiware-data at lists.fi-ware.eu" 
<fiware-data at lists.fi-ware.eu>
Date:   17/06/2011 03:18
Subject:        Re: [Fiware-data] Revised description of basic concepts: 
data elements, context elements and events
Sent by:        fiware-data-bounces at lists.fi-ware.eu



Dear Juanjo and rest of the Folk, 
 
Please find attached the document, which might be already included as a 
part of our FI-WARE spec.
I, personally, agree with our thoughts that Juanjo has expressed and have 
just tailored the below text to a specification style, excluding eventual 
verbosity (and somewhere correcting English, however I don?t pretend 
here).
If you agree we may already use it as a part of official specification. 
 
I still need to improve the reference high-level pub/sub spec, not 
difficult job, however not sure if will have time. Let speak tomorrow 
morning.
 
Best Regards,
Boris
 
From: fiware-data-bounces at lists.fi-ware.eu [
mailto:fiware-data-bounces at lists.fi-ware.eu] On Behalf Of Juanjo Hierro
Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2011 8:29 PM
To: fiware-data at lists.fi-ware.eu
Subject: [Fiware-data] Revised description of basic concepts: data 
elements, context elements and events
 
Folks,

  Please find enclosed a revised version of the document with the 
description of basic concepts: data elements, context elements and events. 
  Hopefully it captures what I believe every of us have in mind.

  I will send later tonight some additional comments elaborating a little 
bit further some points.

  For your convenience and if it helps to continue discussion over the 
email, I attach below the text of the document as body of this message.

  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://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. 
Applications may assign an identifier to Data elements in order to store 
them in some Data Base. However, such identifier would be generated aside 
and would not be considered as part of the structure of the data element. 
Note that a given application may decide to use the value of some 
attribute linked to a data element as its identifier in a given data base 
but, again, there is no identifier associated to the representation of a 
data element.
The basic concepts introduced so far are represented in Figure 1.

Figure 1.    Basic Model for Data
A cornerstone concept in FI-WARE is that data elements are not tied to a 
specific format representation. They can be transferred as an XML document 
at some given point in time and then be translated into another XML 
document representation later on or be transformed into some sort of 
efficient binary representation as part of a message.  They can be stored 
in a Relational Database, in a RDF Repository or as entries in a noSQL 
data base like MongoDB, adopting a particular storage format that may be 
the same or different to the format used when it is transferred.  It 
should be possible to infer the data type associated to a given Data 
Element based on the XML document or the format of the message in which it 
is transferred (e.g., a specific element of the XML document if the same 
XML document type is used to represent data elements of different types or 
just the XML document type if a different XML document type is used per 
data type) or based on the structure used to store it (e.g., may be 
inferred from the name of the table in which the data element is stored).
The way data elements are represented in memory by FI-WARE GEs is not 
specified.  Therefore, the implementer of a FI-WARE GE may decide the way 
it represents data element in memory.
3.                Definition of Context
Context in FI-WARE is represented through context elements. A context 
element extends the concept of data element by associating an EntityId and 
EntityType to it, uniquely identifying the entity in the FI-WARE system to 
which the context element information refers.  In other words, a context 
element is a data element to which we add the association to an EntityId 
and an EntityType. As an example, a measured temperature is a data element 
but in order to become a context element, has to refer to some entity 
which exhibits that temperature (a particular room, a particular building, 
etc). 
In addition, 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.
The basic concepts behind context elements representation are represented 
in Figure 2.

Figure 2.    Basic Model for Context
Note that similar statements regarding format representation of data 
elements also apply to context elements.
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 created internally to some GEs like the 
Complex Event Processing GE or the Publish/Subscribe Broker GE. These 
event objects are defined as a data element (or a context element) to 
which a number of standard event object properties (similar to a header) 
are associated internally to the GE. 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 
is detected by the GE (arrives to the GE).  There might be other 
properties which may be defined and tools will be provided enabling 
applications or admin users to assign values to those properties based on 
values of data element attributes (e.g., source of the event or actual 
creation time) or other characteristics of the data element (i.e., 
DataType) or the context element (i.e., EntityId and EntityType) wrapped 
by the event object.
Data events refer to event objects handled by the CEP GE or the 
Publish/Subscribe Broker GE wrapping a data element, while context events 
refer to event objects handled by the CEP GE or the Publish/Subscribe 
Broker GE wrapping a context element.
 
 





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[attachment "Revised Notes and Thoughts on definition of 
data-context-event Boris.doc" deleted by Guy Sharon/Haifa/IBM] 
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