TriggerWare™: Infrastructure for Data Integration, Internet Search, and Event-Triggered Applications
TriggerWare™ is a data integration and event monitoring infrastructure that can be used to build the next generation of decision support systems:
  • Systems that need to correlate information from different, semi-structured data sources over the Internet.
  • Systems that need to respond to the occurrence of specific event patterns that occur in the world.

TriggerWare™ is a powerful virtual database technology based on the notion of First-Order Logic relations, a generalization of the concept of relation or table in relational databases. This system has been used successfully to tackle many data integration problems. Most recently, TriggerWare™ applications have been used to fundamentally redefine what is possible to do in the realm of Internet search.

  • TriggerWare™ Correlator uses virtual database technology to fundamentally change what is possible for Internet search over semi-structured data sources. Download the vision document.
  • For a demonstration of these innovative search capabilities Contact Cs3.
  • Download the TriggerWare™ data integration product sheet here.
  • For more detailed papers on TriggerWare™, click here.

TriggerWare™ offers several core capabilities that prove to be crucial in data integration problems:

  • Abstraction of the Concept of a Relation: The platform allows addition of new relational representations by supplying a set of interface methods (e.g., to test or generate the tuples of the relation under different conditions). Note that, unlike a traditional database, it is not required that all the tuples of a relation be fully generable.
  • Ability to View Many Computations as Relations: The interfaces above are generic enough that many computations (such as mathematical functions) can be viewed as relations. In addition, this flexibility allows a huge variety of data sources to be abstracted as relations (e.g., log files, web forms, and so on) in the virtual database.
  • Consistency Checking and Trigger Compilation: For transaction-oriented applications, TriggerWare™ provide a transition language to describe data constraints, triggers over complex conditions in the virtual database, and several event correlation primitives.
  • Query Optimization: TriggerWare™ provides a query language over all the relations in the virtual database, independent of representation, thereby offering a foundation for data integration. The TriggerWare™ compiler is able to operationalize queries, constraints, and triggers, and can be guided to select more efficient algorithms using compile-time annotations.

As a complex event processing tool, TriggerWare™ provides a sophisticated platform upon which to base Internet applications that use a "push computing" paradigm based upon event reasoning.

TriggerWare™ is the most sophisticated triggering engine available in the marketplace today. In comparison to its competition, TriggerWare™ offers many critical technology differentiators:

  1. Generic, application-independent monitoring service that can integrate horizontally into many different domains and can even span across multiple domains. This gives TriggerWare™ the ability to fuse event information from many data sources.
  2. Sophisticated event pattern specification capability that provides the ability to describe many useful event patterns -- events that trigger real-world decision making processes.
  3. Dynamic event definition facilities that make it possible to change the criteria of importance on the fly, without any code rewrite or recompilation.
  4. TriggerWare™ maintains complete event histories to enable one to specify new kinds of historical analysis and projections through new computations that can be added dynamically.
  5. APIs to program decision support applications that involve events on a single workstation, a Local Area Network, or the Internet.

TriggerWare™ Architecture

TriggerWare™ is a client/server system with the following important architectural roles:

Important components of TriggerWare™ technology are illustrated in the figure above:
  • Monitored systems: These are the sources of primitive events. They are monitored by the TriggerWare™ infrastructure. Primitive event occurrences are gathered by the Monitor.
  • Event Definers: Composite events are defined in a language called FLEA (Formal Language for Expressing Assumptions). FLEA is the most powerful event definition language in the market, fully equivalent to first-order predicate calculus.
  • Event Receivers: These are clients interested in occurences of specific events. In the figure they are shown together with event definers.
  • FLEA Compiler: processes FLEA event definitions and generates the additional code necessary for the monitor to notice when those events have actually occurred. The FLEA event compiler is what makes TriggerWare™ both unique and efficient in processing new event criteria.
  • Monitor: receives reports of occurrences of primitive events, and executes the code provided by the FLEA compiler to detect whether composite events have occurred, and notifies interested clients about all event occurrences.

Within the TriggerWare™ architecture, note that there is a single FLEA monitor and compiler, but there may be multiple event definers, monitored systems and receiver clients interested in notifications about events. In short, TriggerWare™ supports reasoning about distributed events across any kind of network.