ER designer toolkit: a graphical event definition authoring tool

Abstract

Modern assistive environments have the ability to collect data from various distributed sources and need to react swiftly to changes. As information flows, in the form of simple, source events, it becomes more and more difficult to quickly analyze the collected data in an automated way and transform them into operational knowledge. Event recognition (ER) addresses this problem. Several tools exist for defining ER rules, but only a few of them offer graphical design environments. Each such tool supports a single ER language, either query-based or rule-based. Also, many of these systems do not support the addition of user-defined operators, thus limiting the flexibility in rule design. This paper presents the Event Recognition Designer Toolkit (ERDT), a graphical authoring tool, with which a domain expert can design event recognition rules and produce standalone ER. The goal was to develop a user-friendly graphical tool with a basic set of operators, so that a user could easily produce recognizers for different domains and, when needed, easily extend the tool in order to satisfy domain-specific requirements. The ERDT uses an extendable pool of ER language libraries (at the moment SQL and Event Calculus are supported) and transforms the designed rules into Event Recognizers that use the preferred ER language. The same rule can be expressed in different languages without any changes to the design. Furthermore, the authoring tool is cross platform, free, and open source, so that it can be shared with the community, maximizing its potential impact and possible extension.