Path Mining in Web Processes Using Profiles

Abstract

Business process management systems (BPMSs) (Smith & Fingar, 2003) provide a fundamental infrastructure to define and manage business processes, Web processes, and workflows. When Web processes and workflows are installed and executed, the management system generates data describing the activities being carried out and is stored in a log. This log of data can be used to discover and extract knowledge about the execution of processes. One piece of important and useful information that can be discovered is related to the prediction of the path that will be followed during the execution of a process. I call this type of discovery path mining. Path mining is vital to algorithms that estimate the quality of service of a process, because they require the prediction of paths. In this work, I present and describe how process path mining can be achieved by using data-mining techniques.