Process mining: Converting data from MS-Access Database to MXML format

ProM is a generic open-source framework for implementing process mining tools in a standard environment. The ProM framework receives as input logs in the MXML (Mining eXtensible Markup Language) and XES (eXtensible Event Stream) formats. These formats follow a specified schema definition, which means that logs do not consist of random and disorganized information; they rather contain all the elements needed by the plug-ins at a known location. In this paper, we chose PromImport as a framework to extract MXML log from the data source. The data was received in form of the Database in Microsoft Access. It contained various tables recording information about students´ registration in one of the universities in Thailand. Once the relevant data was located, the extraction and conversion sound fairly straightforward but yet the challenge was how to support event data matched with MXML format. To do this, initially, four tables with a certain structure were filled with data. Secondly a Visual Basic script was written and finally an ODBC connection with Access Database was established.