Standardizing Process-Data Exploitation by Means of a Process-Instance Metamodel

Abstract

The analysis of data produced by the enterprises during processes execution is key to know how these processes are working and how they can be improved. These data may be consumed to make different types of analysis, for example, data could be used as input for process discovery, decision-making and even process querying tools. However, each type of analysis needs data in different formats because they use different techniques and tackle the problem from a different point of view. Fortunately, if we look at the data exploitation problem from a higher level of abstraction perspective, we can realize that all the points of view share a common ground: the business process model and its instantiation are in the kernel of all of them. In this paper, we propose the use of a Business Process Instance Metamodel, which serves as a common interface to make independent the applications producing business process data from those applications that consume and exploit it. A tool has been implemented as a proof of concept to facilitate the matching between data from different data sources and the metamodel.