Processes are an integral part of today’s world, driving services and internal functionalities in businesses, governmental bodies, and organizations around the globe. While there are plenty of systems available for supporting the execution of such processes, the current practices for monitoring and analyzing this execution in the organizational reality still leaves a lot to be desired. Process Mining is able to fill that gap, providing revolutionary means for the analysis and monitoring of real-life processes.
Process Mining research is concerned with the extraction of knowledge about a (business) process from its process execution logs. Process Mining strives to gain insight into various perspectives, such as the process (or control flow) perspective, the performance, data, and organizational perspective (The processmining.org web site has more in-depth information and scientific publications available).
ProM is an extensible framework that supports a wide variety of process mining techniques in the form of plug-ins. It is platform independent as it is implemented in Java, and can be downloaded free of charge. We welcome and support practical applications of ProM, and we invite researchers and developers to contribute in the form of new plug-ins.
ProM 6 is distributed in parts, which offers maximal flexibility. First, the ProM 6 core is distributed as a downloadable package using the GNU Public License (GPL) open source license. This means that you can download and install ProM 6 without restrictions, but that any software that uses the core also needs to be distributed using the GPL license. Second, the ProM 6 plug-ins are distributed as separate packages, which typically use the Lesser GNU Public License (L-GPL) open source license. Note that the use of third part software might require a plug-in to be issued under a different license than the L-GPL license, but in principle ProM 6.3 plug-ins will use the L-GPL license. This means that you can download and install the plug-ins without restrictions, and that you are free to distribute software that uses these plug-ins using your own license. However, if you distribute a changed versions of such a plug-in, you are required to distribute this changed plug-in under the L-GPL license as well.