This post is by Madhavi Shankara Narayana, Software Engineer in the Process and Data Science team at RWTH Aachen. Contact her via email for further inquiries.
Process mining assumes the existence of an event log where each event refers to a case, an activity, and a point in time. XES is an XML based IEEE approved standard format for event logs supported by most of the process mining tools. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), a lightweight data-interchange format has gained popularity over the last decade. Hence, we present JXES, the JSON standard for the event logs.
JXES Format
JSON is an open standard lightweight file format commonly used for data interchange. It uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects.
For defining the JSON standard format, we have taken into account the XES meta-model represented by the basic structure (log, trace and event), Attributes, Nested Attributes, Global Attributes, Event classifiers and Extensions as shown in Figure 1.
The JXES event log structure is as shown in Figure 2.
The plugin for ProM to import and export the JSON file consists of 4 different parser implementations of import as well as export. Plugin implementations are available for Jackson, Jsoninter, GSON and simple JSON parsers.
We hope that the JXES standard defined by this paper will be helpful and serve as a guideline for generating event logs in JSON format. We also hope that the JXES standard defined in this paper will be useful for many tools like Disco, Celonis, PM4Py, etc., to enable support for JSON event logs.
For detailed information on the JXES format, please refer to https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06363