INSTANS: High-Performance Event Processing with Standard RDF and SPARQL

Smart environments require collaboration of multiplatform sensors operated by multiple parties. Proprietary event processing solutions lack interoperation flexibility, leading to overlapping functions that can waste hardware and communication resources. Our goal is to show the applicability of standard RDF and SPARQL - including SPARQL 1.1 Update - for complex event processing tasks. If found feasible, event processing would enjoy the benefits of semantic web technologies: cross-domain interoperability, flexible representation and query capabilities, interrelating disjoint vocabularies, reasoning over event content, and enriching events with linked data. To enable event processing with standard RDF/SPARQL we have created Instans, a high-performance Rete-based platform for continuous execution of interconnected SPARQL queries.