Mining lifecycle event logs for enhancing service-based applications

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), and traditional enterprise systems in general, record a variety of events (e.g., messages being sent and received between service components) to proper log files, i.e., event logs. These files constitute a huge and valuable source of knowledge that may be extracted through data mining techniques. To this end, process mining is increasingly gaining interest across the SOA community. The goal of process mining is to build models without a priori knowledge, i.e., to discover structured process models derived from specific patterns that are present in actual traces of service executions recorded in event logs. However, in this work, the authors focus on detecting frequent sequential patterns, thus considering process mining as a specific instance of the more general sequential pattern mining problem. Furthermore, they apply two sequential pattern mining algorithms to a real event log provided by the Vienna Runtime Environment for Service-oriented Computing, i.e., VRESCo. The obtained results show that the authors are able to find services that are frequently invoked together within the same sequence. Such knowledge could be useful at design-time, when service-based application developers could be provided with service recommendation tools that are able to predict and thus to suggest next services that should be included in the current service composition.