Logic-based event recognition

Today’s organisations require techniques for automated transformation of their large data volumes into operational knowledge. This requirement may be addressed by employing event recognition systems that detect events/activities of special significance within an organisation, given streams of ‘low-level’ information that is very difficult to be utilised by humans. Consider, for example, the recognition of attacks on nodes of a computer network given the TCP/IP messages, the recognition of suspicious trader behaviour given the transactions in a financial market, and the recognition of whale songs given a symbolic representation of whale sounds. Various event recognition systems have been proposed in the literature. Recognition systems with a logic-based representation of event structures, in particular, have been attracting considerable attention, because, among others, they exhibit a formal, declarative semantics, they have proven to be efficient and scalable, and they are supported by machine learning tools automating the construction and refinement of event structures. In this paper we review representative approaches of logic-based event recognition and discuss open research issues of this field. We illustrate the reviewed approaches with the use of a real-world case study: event recognition for city transport management.