Objects and events
Object-centric process mining starts with visualizing your business as objects, events, and the relationships between them. When you model objects, events, and their relationships, you create a digital twin of your business.
An object is a digital representation of something connected to your business that exists in the real world, outside the model. For example:
A customer
A company
An order
An invoice
Each object represents a single instance of that thing - for example, a single invoice that was sent to a customer on a particular date.
An object has a set of attributes, which each describe a characteristic of the object. For example, an invoice has all these attributes:
An ID
A total price
A currency
The values of an object’s attributes show the current known facts about it. If we're tracking it in the business data, an alteration to a value of one of an object’s attributes (add, delete, or change its value) is recorded as a change associated with the object. The record of a change includes the timestamp for when the change took place, and the old and new values of the attribute.
An event is a digital representation of a real-world occurrence that happened, at a single moment in time, to one or more objects connected to your business. For example:
An invoice was paid
A user created a purchase order for a vendor's product
A customer placed an order
An order was shipped
Like an object, an event has a set of attributes. These always include the event’s timestamp and ID, and can include further attributes such as who or what caused the event to happen. You can use attributes of events to divide them up into more specific groups for analysis.
Every event tracks something that happens to one or more objects. An event can be:
A milestone in an object’s existence, such as an invoice (object) being paid (event)
A change to one or more attributes of the objects involved in the event
Using the information recorded in objects and their collections of changes, we can therefore reconstruct each event that happened involving the object, and see when it happened. So we can generate timestamped events from our records of objects and their changes. We can also identify timestamped events in the original business data.
Objects and events are linked to each other by relationships. Relationships between objects and events tells you how the object-centric data model represents these.
Note
In the first release of the object-centric process mining user interface and information, we called attributes “properties”, but we’ve renamed them to match how you use them in views and applications.