Efficient Semantic Event Processing: Lessons Learned in User Interface Integration

Most approaches to application integration require an unambiguous exchange of events. Ontologies can be used to annotate the events exchanged and thus ensure a common understanding of those events. The domain knowledge formalized in ontologies can also be employed to facilitate more intelligent, semantic event processing, but at the cost of higher processing efforts. When application integration and event processing are implemented on the user interface layer, performance is an important issue to ensure acceptable reactivity of the integrated system. In this paper, we analyze different architecture variants of implementing such an event exchange, and present an evaluation with regard to performance. An example of an integrated emergency management system is used to demonstrate those variants.