Querying Workflow Logs

A business process (BP or workflow) is an assembly of tasks to accomplish a business goal. Business process management (BPM) aims to provide support for the design, configuration/implementation, enactment and monitoring, diagnose/analysis, and re-design of workflow. Business analytics or intelligence (BI) is a necessary step towards re-design/improvement. The traditional methodology for BI is the well known sequence of ETL, data/process warehouse, and OLAP tools. In this paper, we focus on the problem of ad hoc querying process enactments for data-centric business processes. We develop an algebraic query language based on "incidents" to allow the user to formulate ad hoc queries directly on workflow logs. A formal semantics and an preliminary query evaluation algorithm are provided.