Connecting databases with process mining: a meta model and toolset

Abstract

Process mining techniques require event logs which, in many cases, are obtained from databases. Obtaining these event logs is not a trivial task and requires substantial domain knowledge. In addition, an extracted event log provides only a single view on the database. To change our view, e.g., to focus on another business process and generate another event log, it is necessary to go back to the source of data. This paper proposes a meta model to integrate both process and data perspectives, relating one to the other. It can be used to generate different views from the database at any moment in a highly flexible way. This approach decouples the data extraction from the application of analysis techniques, enabling the application of process mining in different contexts.

Case notion discovery and recommendation: automated event log building on databases

“…Therefore, our log building technique will be feasible. The fact that this kind of data and correlations can be obtained in real-life environments has been previously demonstrated in [6]. Our approach defines case notions based on the data model of the dataset (classes and relationships) and projects the data onto it (objects, object versions, and events) to find build traces with correlated events.…”

“…This information should be extracted and transformed to fit into a specific data structure. An appropriate structure has been previously defined as a meta-model [6] and implemented in a queryable file format called OpenSLEX. Figure 2 shows a high-level view of the meta-model that describes the OpenSLEX format.…”

“…The OpenSLEX format makes use of a SQL schema to store all the information, and a Java API 4 is available for its integration in other tools. An evaluation of the use of OpenSLEX [6] in several environments tackles the data extraction and transformation phase and demonstrates its flexibility and potential to enable standard querying and advanced data analyses. To keep this paper self-contained and to provide the necessary background for the understanding of this work, a simplified version of the meta-model is formally presented below.…”

“…However, some constraints must be fulfilled for a meta-model to be considered a valid connected meta-model (e.g., versions of the same object do not overlap in time). The details about such constraints are out of the scope of this paper, but their description can be found in [6]. From now on, any reference to input or extracted data will assume to be in the form of a valid connected meta-model.…”

“…7, the goal is to provide input event logs to the user to be analyzed during the explorative phase of a process mining project, while reducing the time spent performing manual tasks. First, we rely of previous work [6] to extract the data from the source database, transforming and storing it in a format suitable for automated analysis. Then, we collect several statistics on different dimensions.…”