A semantic approach to the discovery of workflow activity patterns in event logs

Workflow activity patterns represent a set of recurrent behaviours that can be found in a wide range of business processes. In this paper we address the problem of determining the presence of these patterns in process models. This is usually done manually by the analyst, who inspects the model and interprets its elements in terms of the semantics of those patterns. Here, we present an approach to perform this discovery based on the event log created during process execution. The approach makes use of an ontology and the semantic annotation of the event log in order to discover the patterns automatically by means of semantic reasoning. We illustrate the application of the proposed approach in a case study involving a purchase process implemented in a commercial workflow system.

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