Event stream processing

Event stream processing, or ESP, is a set of technologies designed to assist the construction of event-driven information systems. ESP technologies include event visualization, event databases, event-driven middleware, and event processing languages, or complex event processing (CEP). In practice, the terms ESP and CEP are often used interchangeably. ESP deals with the task of processing streams of event data with the goal of identifying the meaningful pattern within those streams, employing techniques such as detection of relationships between multiple events, event correlation, event hierarchies, and other aspects such as causality, membership and timing. ESP enables many different applications such as algorithmic trading in financial services, radio-frequency identification (RFID) event processing applications, fraud detection, process monitoring, and location-based services in telecommunications.