With the setting up of IoT environments across our personal, professional, and social environments to fulfill the dreams of connected and smarter environments, the amount of multi-structured data getting generated, collected, cleansed, and crunched is growing exponentially. With the arrival of a dazzling array of specific and generic, disappearing, disposable yet indispensable, slim and sleek, handy and trendy, embedded yet networked devices, the projected big data era has set in. This has opened up fresh possibilities and opportunities for businesses as well as IT service/solution providers.
With our manufacturing floors, retail stores, warehouses, airports, railway stations, and bus bays, multi-specialty clinics, shopping complexes, malls and hypermarkets, auditoriums and stadiums, entertainment centers and cinema theaters, food joints, and so on, slowly yet steadily tending towards being smarter through the application of pioneering edge technologies, the long-awaited context-aware computing is becoming a reality. That is, software applications have to be context-aware to be adaptive, accommodating, and adjustable.
Considering the trends and transitions happening in the IT space, a few researchers (David Corral-Plaza and his team) have envisioned a holistic event-driven service-oriented architecture (ED-SOA) and it has the following important factors:
- Data producers should gather data from several sources (databases, IoT sensors, social networks, and so on) and send them to the data collector.
- The data collector follows the necessary transformations so that the information received can be used in the following phases of their solution. It is an intermediate layer that performs a process of homogenization since information will most probably be received in different formats and structures in most scenarios.
- Data processing should provide the complex event processing (CEP), context-awareness, and prediction module.
- Data consumers, which can be databases, end users, or additional endpoints, pave the way for the collaborative architecture. Such data consumers communicate with the previous module through a REST interface:
We are heading towards the world of real-time applications and enterprises. Real-time data capture, processing, knowledge discovery and dissemination, decision making, and actuation turn out to be the new normal. IT systems are being enabled to be real-time. The preceding architecture spells out the ways and means of achieving real-time predictions.