On web services workflow mining

Abstract

With the ever growing importance of the service-oriented paradigm in system architectures more and more (business) processes will be executed using service-oriented systems. Therefore, we believe that the ability to discover processes in loosely-coupled systems is essential in system optimization. Firstly, we briefly describe our previously introduced idea of Web Services Interaction Mining (WSIM) and then direct our attention on mining for workflows in logs provided by SOA. We thoroughly examine strategies in other fields of mining for their applicability in SOA. After that, we discuss logging possibilities in service-oriented systems and analyze mining opportunities with regards to the provided logs. As a case study we present a service-oriented system and its logging features. We conclude with a demonstration of how we successfully applied existing process mining strategies on this system's logs and present the results of that mining in the form of workflow models. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.