Occurused

Occurused is a neologism used to denote an event occurrence that has already been consumed by downstream processes in a data pipeline or event-driven system. The term combines occur and used, signaling that a particular data item or event has moved from producers to consumers.

In practice, occurused can be represented as a boolean flag on an event record, or as a status in a processing ledger. It helps distinguish unconsumed events from those that have already been acted upon, supporting data provenance and reliability.

Applications include auditing, avoiding duplicate processing, and enabling precise lineage graphs. It supports reprocessing, rollback, and reconciliation by clarifying which events have already been acted on.

Relation to other concepts: It is related to event flags, process tokens, and data provenance frameworks, but is less standardized than formal state machines or messages with explicit acknowledgments.

Origins: The term appears in niche discussions within data engineering and event-sourcing communities in the 2010s and 2020s; it has not been adopted as a formal standard by major frameworks but appears in internal documentation, blogs, and academic papers.

Example: A purchase event is produced. After fraud screening, the event is marked occurused, and downstream systems know the event has been processed. If an inventory check later detects a discrepancy, reprocessing tasks can select only events that are not yet occurused.