Using Event Processing To Prevent Violencia De Género (Gender Violence)

Violencia de género (gender violence, where males most often hurt but sometimes even kill their female partners) is a significant social and, therefore, political problem in Spain and many other countries. It is a complex issue to address, with multiple agencies involved. Most existing attempts to prevent it are reactive, and all too often, agencies are not able to react fast enough to help the victim. As this case study describes, Navento Technology, a Madrid-based company, has created an innovative solution that — by combining global positioning systems (GPS), general packet radio service (GPRS), event processing, and Web services — enables a proactive, preventative approach at one-tenth the cost of the traditional reactive approach. The relevance to application development professionals is the way in which Navento's solution demonstrates how combinations of technologies plus event processing and Web services can generate solutions relevant to mainstream IT (in this case, the many agencies trying to cope with violencia de género). As this case study makes clear, such an approach may also be relevant to agencies working to address multiple other social issues in other countries — from pedophilia to criminal probation to stalking to sexual harassment.