Unification of geospatial reasoning, temporal logic, & social network analysis in event-based systems

This industry paper is about a new type of event database architecture that makes it efficient to reason about things, people, companies, relationships between people and companies, and about places and events. This event database is built on top of a scalable distributed RDF triple store that can handle literally billions of events. Like objects, events have at least one actor, but usually more, a start-time and possibly an end-time, a place where the event happened, and the type of the event. An event can have many additional properties and annotations. For example, telephone call detail records, email records, financial transactions, purchases, hospital visits, insurance claims, library records, etc. can all be viewed as events. On top of this event database we implemented very efficient geospatial and temporal queries, an extensive social network analysis library and simplified description logic. This paper focuses on a query framework that makes it easy to combine all of the aforementioned capabilities in a user friendly query language.