Extended Event Log: Towards a Unified Standard for Process Mining

TL;DR

This paper addresses the lack of a unified, generic event-log standard for process mining and proposes Extended Event Log to unify and enrich event data. It builds on OCEL-like and process-warehouse ideas by introducing meta/instance levels and an activity-step layer that ties events to business objects. A XML-based demonstration and a Petri-net generator illustrate the concept, though formal evaluation and real-world validation remain for future work. If adopted, the Extended Event Log could reduce project-specific tailoring and improve visualization and insight in process mining.

Abstract

Process mining has grown popular today given their ability to provide managers with insights into the actual business process as executed by employees. Process mining depends on event logs found in process aware information systems to model business processes. This has raised the need to develop event log standards given that event logs are the entry point to any process mining project. One of the main challenges of event logs and process mining in general as was mentioned by the IEEE task force on process mining deals with the finding, merging and cleaning event data.This resulted in having multiple event log standards with different features. This paper attempts to propose a new unified standard for event logs that enriches the results of process mining without the need to tailor event logs for each process mining project.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Workflow Model 19.
• Figure 2: Proposed Extended Event Log Adapted from 19.
• Figure 3: Petri Net Output from the Proposed Event Log.