Connections among Events

When thinking about how things happen in the world, it is interesting to relate how events are related. Many times it is difficult to predict how an event in one part of the world can have catastrophic (or wonderful) consequences in another part of the world that is really far away. And this all happens thru causality that manifests itself in many ways. It is always intriguing to think how your actions at one place may affect others that you may not even know exist.

This thought was triggered by a story in WSJ about how nomadic herders in Mongolia are being seriously affected by the erosion in demand of Cashmere in Western countries due to the global downturn believed to be triggered by housing bubble in United States.

Developing technology to create EventWeb may help us simulate many complex phenomea and run what-if experiments.

2 thoughts on “Connections among Events

  1. paolo

    Sending this comment while speaking with you during the LiveMemories strategy meeting 😉

    From our internalwiki, just copying and pasting the Event part 😉

    https://livememorieswiki.fbk.eu/index.php/Core_Data_Structure#Event

    Event

    See the definition of Event in the Glossary.

    Event
    {{Thing attributes}, …}

    Metadata for an event provides descriptive information that is the basis for discovery of the purpose, location, duration, and responsible agents associated with an event. Examples include an exhibition, webcast, conference, workshop, open day, performance, battle, trial, wedding, tea party, conflagration.

    References

    * Dublin Core event

    [edit] The Event Model

    What follows is inspired by the framework described in “Toward Common Event Model for Multimedia Applications”

    In this framework, a common event model is proposed in order to allow integration and syndication of events and media from largely isolated multimedia applications and data sources, making possible novel cross-application and crossdata source multimedia services.

    The Event:

    – Is a significant occurrence that takes place in point in time.

    – Is a first-class entity that is independent on the media documenting it, that is, an event is not considered as a metadata describing a medium; instead, media are considered metadata documenting the course of an event.

    – Its model should provide means for global (that is, media-independent) unique identification. The event model’s identification system permits the unique identification of events in a uniform fashion, regardless of the events’ sources.

    – Has 6 basic aspects: spatial, temporal, informational, experiential, structural, causal

    The aspects of an event description are shortly described below. As an example, a “soccer match” event is considered.

    Temporal Aspect

    This aspect concerns the temporal awareness contained in an event description. There are different ways of capturing the temporal aspect:

    – Physical time: the instant or time interval when the event happens. It can be measured as a global time (e.g., date, time), a relative time (e.g., minutes of game) or a media-related time (e.g., frame numbers of a video documenting an event). The global and relative time can be modeled by the TimeInterval e-type previously described.

    – Logical time: application domain’s abstract temporal concept which describes the event (e.g., the last match of the season)

    Spatial Aspect

    This aspect concerns the location awareness contained in an event description. There are different ways of capturing the spatial aspect:

    – Physical Location: the geographical place where the event takes place. A physical location is characterized by GPS coordinates, city and country specifications, etc. For example, the soccer match takes place at the Olimpic Stadium of Rome.

    – Logical Location: refers to a spatial domain concept (e.g., the match takes place in a stadium)

    Informational Aspect

    This aspect concerns information about the event. They can include the event type (e.g., soccer match), the event description (e.g., the Inter-Juve soccer match of the Champions League), the entities (agent and artifacts) involved (e.g., players and ball), the role of such entities (e.g., forward, goalkeeper, ball), other parameters (e.g., current score, number of players, etc.), the event “mode”, that is, how the event takes place: it coulbe an online event or a physical event.

    Experiential Aspect

    To augment the exploration and experience of an event, a media-aware component should be associated to it. A set of media (e.g., images, videos, audios, etc.) should thus documents how a (past) event evolved.

    Structural Aspect

    This aspect concerns the decomposition of high-level events into low-level events. Sub-events can be aggregated so to form more composite events (e.g., a set of matches forms a season). Knowledge on subevents can give useful hints on the composite event.

    Causal Aspect

    This aspect concerns the discovering of a chain of events which led to the event in question. Given an event, there should be an explicit representation of such cause-events chain.

    Event Relationships

    The last two aspects (Structural and Causal) put in relation more events. Here comes the issue of devising relationship between events. Some types of relationship are listed below:

    1) Structural

    Connect two events by expliciting a “part-of” relationship

    2) Causal

    Connect two events by expliciting a sort of “caused-by” relationship

    3) Temporal

    Connect two events by expliciting a temporal relationship (e.g., event A occurred during event B)

    4) Spatial

    Connect two events by expliciting a topological relation (e.g., event A takes place in the same place of event B)
    [edit] Event Metadata

    In view of what has been said before, some metadata are proposed for the Event e-type. The string “//” represents a comment.

    Event
    {{Thing attributes},
    period TimeInterval, //Temporal Aspect
    logicalTime String,
    location Location, //Spatial Aspect
    abstract String, //Informational Aspect
    mode String,
    participant {Things},
    role {String},
    resources {Media}, //Experiential Aspect

    }

    The above event metadata are possibily not complete.

    In LM:

    – The relationships between events are represented as attributes of an event type (SWEB technique is adopted)

    – there is no an explicit distinction between an “abstract” and a “physical” location in the event structure;
    [edit] EXAMPLES

    In the following examples, the data structure instances are represented in XML style.
    [edit] Industry Injury

    EVE-01

    2009:01:13:14:30
    2009:01:13:15:00

    riva del garda

    real
    Carlo Proietti
    colleague
    killed
    death-dealing

    [edit] Thesis Defence

    EVE-02

    2008:04:18:16:00
    2008:04:18:19:00

    conference hall, university of Bath, UK

    real
    John Wegg
    professors
    relatives
    friends
    speaker
    commission
    audience
    audience

    [edit] Graduation Party

    EVE-03

    2008:04:20:19:00F
    2008:04:21:06:00F

    Bradford on Avon, UK

    real
    John Wegg
    relatives
    friends
    guest-honor
    guest
    guest

    [edit] Presentation Preparation

    EVE-04

    2008:04:14:10:00F
    2008:04:17:20:00F

    home, Bath, UK

    real
    John Wegg
    family
    cat

    [edit] Story

    Story
    {{Thing attributes}, …}

    We refer to the definition of Story in the Glossary

    The following is a possible structure for a story. It represents an extended version of the story template Glossary

    Story
    {{Thing attributes},
    creator String,
    creation-date Date,
    title String,
    subject String,
    abstract String,
    location Location,
    time TimeInterval,
    event {Event},
    tags {String},
    related-story {Story},
    contributor {User},
    resource {Media},
    microStoryFlag Boolean,
    comments {Comment},

    }

    [edit] Story Structure – Example 1

    This is an example of the story structure relative to the story N°1 described in the STORY EXAMPLES section of the glossary

    STO-01
    ANMIL
    16-01-2009
    Carlo Proietti accident
    industrial injury

    2009:01:13::

    riva del Garda, trentino alto adige
    Riva del Garda
    Trentino Alto Adige
    Italy

    Carlo Proietti was unloading some material from its lorry, when he was run
    over by the wagon elevator driven by another worker in a paper factory.
    EVE-01
    STO-02
    false

    Yet another story of lack of safety on the job
    US-1
    2009:01:14:22:00

    [edit] Story Structure – Example 2

    This is an example of the story structure relative to the story N°2 described in the STORY EXAMPLES section of the glossary

    STO-02
    Anna Rossi
    03-02-2009
    My husband death
    pain

    2009:01:13::

    riva del garda

    it was an ordinary morning…in that day, Carlo went to work after its usual breakfast.
    Its job consisted mainly in unloading heavy material from trucks…although it was a
    tuff job, he always did it with devotion and professionalism. In that awful day, he was
    squashed flat by the wagon elevator of its colleague.
    EVE-01
    STO-01
    false

    [edit] Story Structure – Example 3

    This is an example of the story structure relative to the story N°3 described in the STORY EXAMPLES section of the glossary

    STO-02
    John Wegg
    03-02-2009
    My graduation adventure
    graduation
    Bath, UK

    2008:04:::

    Bath, UK
    Bath
    Somerset
    United Kingdom

    my graduation adventure started when…


    My graduation was a memorable experience!

    EVE-04
    EVE-02
    EVE-03

  2. Communication Skills

    Could this perhaps be because the whole planet is a system with systems within systems and subsystems? The wikipedia states that systems theory includes the thinking that everything in a system is interrelated. It is not surprising,then, that when something happens at one end of the system, the whole of the system is affected and even changed. An interesting thought…

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