Hi James!

I think you and my good friend Paul Vincent should be careful not to reduce CEP (accidentally or intentionally) to rule-based systems, and broaden your perspectives and blog entries. If you (I am sure you have) read the original work on CEP by Dr. Luckham, the point of CEP is to solve complex problems in many problem domains, many require backwards chaining, uncertainty principles, statistical methods and more. Rule-based systems are interesting and useful, congruent with expert-systems, and have well documented limitations in the classes of complex problems they can address.

Both you and Paul have excellent backgrounds in rule-based systems and have worked together in this area. CEP is not simply "rules and events" or "rules with EDA" etc.

Dr. Luckam's background as a distinquished professor at Stanford was AI, including debugging large scale distributed systems and performing complex network security research for DARPA. In all of these application areas, there is a known limit to the usefulness of rule-based approaches to address complex classes of decision support systems that require statistical methods to mitigate uncertainty. Rule-based systems are useful, but do not address this challenge as well as other methods.

I enjoy watching you and Paul supporting each other in the area of rules-based approaches to CEP. Please keep in mind that CEP was designed to be significantly broader than rule-based decision support.

Yours faithfully, Tim

www.thecepblog.com