Mining Blockchain Processes: Extracting Process Mining Data from Blockchain Applications

Abstract

Blockchain technology has been gaining popularity as a platform for developing decentralized applications and executing cross-organisational processes. However, extracting data that allows analysing the process view from blockchains is surprisingly hard. Therefore, blockchain data are rarely used for process mining. In this paper, we propose a framework for alleviating that pain. The framework comprises three main parts: a manifest specifying how data is logged, an extractor for retrieving data (structured according to the XES standard), and a generator that produces logging code to support smart contract developers. Among others, we propose a convenient way to encode logging data in a compact form, to achieve relatively low cost and high throughput for on-chain logging. The proposal is evaluated with logs created from generated logging code, as well as with existing blockchain applications that do not make use of the proposed code generator.