In the world around us, every second of every minute of every hour, the human brain is bombarded with a limitless number of things that happen either at the same time or sequentially, or in a totally and seemingly erratic way that may not make sense immediately but as more of these things happen, we can start to understand their relevance and importance.
For example, we hear cheering in the distance, we see balloons flying in the air, music starts to play, police cars and trucks appear pulling brightly covered trailers with puppets and people waving on them, followed by ambulances, and today's date is July 4th. Individually, these events could mean anything, but together? It's probably an Independence Day Carnival Parade!
Our brain can easily determine this fact in the blink of an eye" and while not overly simple to define in computing terms, we could describe a "Parade Event Pattern" as follows:
Note
One (or more) police cars + followed/preceded by, or adjacent to + one (or more) carnival trucks + followed/preceded by, or adjacent to + one (or more waving people) + followed/preceded by, or adjacent to + one (or more emergency vehicles) + where music can be heard + and today's date is 4th July
Your brain is not restricted to sending information and just waiting until there is a response, or forced into following a series of fixed steps to get something done. As with this example, it is able to take the events happening now, their relevance to additional external factors such as today's anniversary date and understand a "parade" event pattern.
So as you learn more about Complex Event Processing, we focus on how this technology can take continuously flowing, never-ending information, from a potentially unlimited number of different places, and immediately understand how it relates to things happening right now and in the very near future, commonly known as Real-Time Situation Awareness .