Glossary in the process mining capability

Activity — An activity in the process mining capability refers to a specific task or action that is part of a business process. These activities can be carried out by either humans or machines, and the sequence of these activities leads to the completion of a business process.

Attributes — Attributes refer to the dimensions or columns in your data.

Contributor — A role that allows users to create and upload recordings to a task mining process. Contributors can manage and label their own recordings, but they cannot edit other people's recordings or the process itself.

Co-owner — A role that has similar privileges to the process owner. Co-owners can edit the process and its recordings, invite people to the process, manage label templates, and more.

Dataflow — A cloud-based, self-service data preparation technology that enables users to ingest, transform, and load data into Microsoft Dataverse environments, Power BI workspaces, or their organization's Azure Data Lake Storage account.

Data Lake — Azure Data Lake is a platform that provides developers, data scientists, and analysts with the capabilities to store and process data of any size, shape, and speed across different platforms and languages.

Data source — The location of the event log data. Dataflow uses connectors to access various data sources.

Event logs — Tabular data that captures the details of a business process, including the sequence of activities, time stamps, and resources used. The minimum column requirements for process mining are case ID, activity ID, and start timestamp. Also known as event data.

Power Query — A data transformation and preparation engine that comes with a graphical interface for acquiring data from sources and a Power Query Editor for applying transformations.

Process — A series of activities performed to achieve a specific goal. Examples include planning demand and converting purchase requisitions to purchase orders.

Process map — A visual representation of the flow of a process based on imported user or system data.

Process mining — Visualizing and analyzing business processes based on event logs. These event logs are stored in information systems and can capture details such as order information, activity start and completion times, resource usage, and more.

Recording — A recorded sequence of activities that a user performs on their desktop. Multiple recordings are typically analyzed together to gain insights into different variants of the same task.

Robotic process automation (RPA) — Software that automates basic, repetitive tasks across applications.

Task mining — A technology that captures and analyzes users' interactions with computers to improve task performance.

Variant — A specific path that a process can take to completion.

Workflow — The sequence of industrial, administrative, or other processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion.