Towards Unified Heterogeneous Event Processing for the Internet of Things

RFID technology and the Internet of Things provide a flood of information which can be regarded as a stream of complex events. The most acute complex event data management challenges today stem from organizations which rely on a large number of diverse, interrelated data sources, but with difficulties of managing their event data in a unified, integrated and correlated way. It is because, up until now, there is no standard data stream query language and the fundamental questions in connection with data models and formal semantics for stream queries have not yet been thoroughly addressed. In this paper, we present the design of a framework named HEP which integrates the representation of two typical categories of event streams (relational and XML event streams). Our framework supports unified event fusing and processing with a general window specification that can be used to express almost all types of windows of which we are aware, and is semantically clear and easy to understand. It can be extended to new types of windows that may occur in the future for some new IoT applications. We provide a real case prototype implementation, and experiments show the usefulness and effectiveness of our method.