Integrating ISA and Part-of Domain Knowledge into Process Model Discovery

• Published in: Future internet Vol. 14; no. 12; p. 357
• Main Authors: Bottrighi, Alessio, Guazzone, Marco, Leonardi, Giorgio, Montani, Stefania, Striani, Manuel, Terenziani, Paolo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.12.2022
• Subjects: Domains; Internet; Knowledge; knowledge-based process model discovery; Mineral industry; Mining industry; process model abstraction; Redundancy; Semantics; Subject specialists; Germany
• ISSN: 1999-5903; 1999-5903
• DOI: 10.3390/fi14120357

The traces of process executions are a strategic source of information, from which a model of the process can be mined. In our recent work, we have proposed SIM (semantic interactive miner), an innovative process mining tool to discover the process model incrementally: it supports the interaction with domain experts, who can selectively merge parts of the model to achieve compactness, generalization, and reduced redundancy. We now propose a substantial extension of SIM, making it able to exploit (both automatically and interactively) pre-encoded taxonomic knowledge about the refinement (ISA relations) and composition (part-of relations) of process activities, as is available in many domains. The extended approach allows analysts to move from a process description where activities are reported at the ground level to more user-interpretable/compact descriptions, in which sets of such activities are abstracted into the “macro-activities” subsuming them or constituted by them. An experimental evaluation based on a real-world setting (stroke management) illustrates the advantages of our approach.