Matching Heterogeneous Event Data

Identifying events from different sources is essential to various business process applications such as provenance querying or process mining. Distinct features of heterogeneous events, including opaque names and dislocated traces, prevent existing data integration techniques from performing well. To address these issues, in this paper, (1) we propose an event similarity function by iteratively evaluating similar neighbors. (2) In addition to event nodes, we further employ the similarity of edges (indicating relationships among events) in event matching. We prove NP-hardness of finding the optimal event matching w.r.t. node and edge similarities, and propose an efficient heuristic for event matching. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed event matching approach can achieve significantly higher accuracy than state-of-the-art matching methods. In particular, by considering the event edge similarity, our heuristic matching algorithm further improves the matching accuracy without introducing much overhead.