The IEEE Standards Association has officially published the XES Standard as IEEE Std 1849TM-2016: IEEE Standard for eXtensible Event Stream (XES) for Achieving Interoperability in Event Logs and Event Streams on November 11th, 2016. The IEEE Task Force on Process Mining has been driving the standardization process since then, because the standard allows for the exchange of event data between different process mining tools.

Through the XES Standard, event data can be transported from the system where it was generated to the system in which it can be stored and analyzed, without losing semantics. The XES Standard enforces that these transport and storage are done in a way that is clear and well-understood. Next to providing a standardized syntax and semantics, the XES Standard also allows for extensions, e.g., adding cost information or domain specific attributes to events.

We would like to invite vendors to initiate the XES certification process for your tool in collaboration with the XES working group as part of IEEE Task Force on Process Mining. Being XES-certified means that the tool is assigned multiple XES certification levels to a tool, both for its import and export functionalities. Based on these certification levels, it is straightforward to check that the export of other tools can be successfully imported in your tool. 

Benefits

• Accuracy Guarantee: Even though a tool may generate and get as input event data that comply with the XES Standard, there is no guarantee that the export of another tool can be successfully imported in your tool. Whether this data transfer can be done may still depend on whether the actual content of the XES event data matches the assumptions of the importing tool. The certification overcomes this issue by assuring that the entire process of your tool complies with the standard from both sides (import and export).
• Marketing Advantage: Certification is an effective marketing tool for testing, calibration and measurement, and a passport to submit tenders to contractors that require verified event-data processing tools such as your tool would be.
• Benchmark for Performance: the XES certification benefits process mining tools like yours. It allows them to determine whether they are performing their work following the appropriate IEEE standard. Many process mining tool developers operate in isolation to their peers, and rarely, if ever, receive any independent technical evaluation as a measure of their standardised event data treatment. This certification also provides you with a benchmark for maintaining that competence.