Immutability and Event Derivation in RDF

“In many event processing systems […] events are immutable” ¹. This stems from the definition of what an event is: “An event is an occurrence within a particular system or domain; it is something that has happened, or is contemplated as having happened […]” ². So events cannot be made to unhappen.

Open Question: Does this apply to all systems/applications/usecases or just to “many” as stated above?

I made immutability a general assumption in my work³. It is very useful for building systems (distributed systems, consistency, …).

Q: How can a Stream processing agent process events if they are immutable?

A: Every processing task produces new derived events as results. Advantage: the underived events are still available for other uses and remain immutable.

For RSP this means: (1) create a new (unique) graph for the derived event (2) possibly link back to the base event(s) thus enabling drill-down or root cause / provenance analysis of the derived event. The links can be made with DUL:hasConstituent from DOLCE Ultralight ⁴. In my own work ⁵ I use a new :members property to link from a derived event to its simple events. The property is a subproperty of the mentioned DUL:hasConstituent.

Observation: We talk about adding “received time” and other metadata later by receiving agents: Adding triples later to the event graph with graphname as subject can still be legal and considered as amending the event header. Much like with email: headers can be added by intermediate mail servers but the mail body and ID are immutable.