Unanswered Questions PDF Print

“Is a traffic jam going to happen in this highway? And is then convenient to reallocate travelers based upon the forecast?” “By looking at the click stream coming from a given IP, can we notice the shifts of interest of the person behind the computer?” “Which contents of the news Web portal are attracting more attention? Which navigation pattern would lead readers to other news related to those contents?” “Are trends in medical records indicative of any new disease spreading in given parts of the world?” “Where are all my friends meeting?”  “In the financial context, can we detect any intraday correlation clusters among stock exchange?”  Although the information is often available, there’s no software system capable of computing the answers - indeed, no system enables users even to issue such queries.

 
Background Information PDF Print

Data streams occur in a variety of modern applications, such as network monitoring, traffic engineering, sensor networks, RFID tags applications, telecom call records, financial applications, Web logs, click-streams. Specialized Stream Database Management Systems exist. While such systems proved to be an optimal solution for on the fly analysis of data streams, they cannot perform complex reasoning tasks, such as the ones required for computing the answers to the above queries. At the same time, while reasoners are year after year scaling up in the classical, time invariant domain of ontological knowledge, reasoning upon rapidly changing information has been neglected or forgotten. Reasoning systems assume static knowledge, and do not manage “changing worlds” – at most, one can update the ontological knowledge and then repeat the reasoning tasks.

 

 
An Unexplored, yet High Impact, Research Area PDF Print
We hereby propose stream reasoning - an unexplored, yet high impact, research area - as the new multi-disciplinary approach which will provide the abstractions, foundations, methods, and tools required to integrate data streams and reasoning systems, thus giving answer to the above and innumerable other questions. The idea is simple, yet pervasive. Starting from lesson learned in the database community (e.g., the ability to efficiently abstract and aggregate information out of multiple, high-throughput streams) a new foundational theory of stream reasoning is needed, capable to associate reasoning tasks to time windows describing data validity and to therefore to produce time-varying inferences. From these foundations, new paradigms for knowledge representation and query languages design must be derived, and the consequent computational frameworks for stream reasoning oriented software architectures and their instrumentation must be deployed.
 
IEEE-IS Paper PDF Print

It's a Streaming World! Reasoning upon Rapidly Changing Information
November/December 2009 (vol. 24 no. 6)
pp. 83-89

Emanuele Della Valle, Politecnico di Milano
Stefano Ceri, Politecnico di Milano
Frank van Harmelen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Dieter Fensel, University of Innsbruck

DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MIS.2009.125 

Now FREELY available to the public through Computing Now

 

 
Tag Cloud PDF Print
Wordle: Stream reasoning
 
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