The efforts of the Taskforce for developing the next standard for event data in process mining –aiming at the Object-Centric Event Data (OCED)– are reaching a new stage. At the last ICPM 2024 in Copenhagen, the OCED working group released the whitepaper Towards a Simple and Extensible Standard for OCED. It summarizes the requirements, ideas, and experiences so far, covering the following aspects:

• a proposal for a core model for OCED;
• a broad discussion of usages, extension, limitations, and open points;
• insights of five independent OCED implementations and case studies.

This whitepaper serves as the starting point for the next stage: developing an actual standard to be certified via the IEEE.

The OCED working group is at this moment regrouping for standardization. Moe Wynn and Julian Lebherz, who successfully led the efforts in the last four years within the working group with Eric Verbeek and Claudio Di Ciccio, are handing over the task to Dirk Fahland and the new industrial co-lead, Julian Theis, Manager at the Deloitte Center for Process Bionics.

The ambition is to realize a simple, versatile standard for OCED that truly facilitates data exchange from source systems to process mining solutions, reducing the effort in setting up process mining analyses and enabling entirely new use cases –and hence gathers strong industry adoption.

To get there, the working group is aiming for a 3-phase process:

1. jointly establishing the scope and requirements for the standard;
2. developing a clear standard and reference implementations with strong consensus from the entire community (industry and academia);
3. certifying the standard through the formal IEEE process.

To succeed, the OCED working group aims at >50% industry participation in the upcoming discussions. If you want to participate, please contact Dirk Fahland and Julian Theis.

The working group will start regular meetings towards standardization in autumn 2025. Calls for contributions will be shared after the summer, so stay tuned!