Challenges in service mining : record, check, discover

Process mining aims to discover, monitor and improve real processes by extracting knowledge from event logs abundantly available in today’s information systems. Although process mining has been applied in hundreds of organizations and process mining techniques have been embedded in a variety of commercial tools, to date these techniques have rarely been used for analyzing web services. One of the obvious reasons is that cross-organizational event data cannot be shared easily. However, (1) messages exchanged between services tend to be structured, (2) service-orientation continues to be the predominant implementation paradigm, and (3) the most substantial efficiency gains can often only be achieved across different organizations. Hence, there are many possible applications for service mining, i.e., applying process mining techniques to services. If messages are recorded, then one can discover a process describing interactions between services. If, in addition, descriptive or normative models are available, one can use process mining to check conformance and highlight performance problems. This extended abstract aims to provide pointers to ongoing work on service mining and lists some of the main challenges in this emerging field.