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OCEL: A Standard for Object-Centric Event Logs

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New Trends in Database and Information Systems (ADBIS 2021)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1450))

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Abstract

The application of process mining techniques to real-life information systems is often challenging. Considering a Purchase to Pay (P2P) process, several case notions such as order and item are involved, interacting with each other. Therefore, creating an event log where events need to relate to a single case (i.e., process instance) leads to convergence (i.e., the duplication of an event related to different cases) and divergence (i.e., the inability to separate events within the same case) problems. To avoid such problems, object-centric event logs have been proposed, where each event can be related to different objects. These can be exploited by a new set of process mining techniques. This paper describes OCEL (Object-Centric Event Log), a generic and scalable format for the storage of object-centric event logs. The implementation of the format can use either JSON or XML, and tool support is provided.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Standalone library; https://github.com/OCEL-standard/ocel-support.

  2. 2.

    ProM 6.10 nightly build; package: OCELStandard.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Stiftung for supporting our research. Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy–EXC-2023 Internet of Production – 390621612.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Process and Data Science Chair, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Anahita Farhang Ghahfarokhi, Gyunam Park, Alessandro Berti & Wil M. P. van der Aalst

  2. Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology, Sankt Augustin, Germany

    Alessandro Berti & Wil M. P. van der Aalst

Authors
  1. Anahita Farhang Ghahfarokhi
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  2. Gyunam Park
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  3. Alessandro Berti
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  4. Wil M. P. van der Aalst
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anahita Farhang Ghahfarokhi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. LIAS/ISAE-ENSMA, Chasseneuil-du-Poitou, France

    Ladjel Bellatreche

  2. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Marlon Dumas

  3. Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Panagiotis Karras

  4. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Raimundas Matulevičius

  5. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Ahmed Awad

  6. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Matthias Weidlich

  7. University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia

    Mirjana Ivanović

  8. Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Olaf Hartig

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Ghahfarokhi, A.F., Park, G., Berti, A., van der Aalst, W.M.P. (2021). OCEL: A Standard for Object-Centric Event Logs. In: Bellatreche, L., et al. New Trends in Database and Information Systems. ADBIS 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1450. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85082-1_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85082-1_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-85081-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-85082-1

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