4.4 Flattening Reality into Event Logs
In order to do process mining, events need to be related to cases. As indicated before, this is natural as a process model describes the life-cycle of a case of a particular type. All activities in a conventional process model (independent of the notation used) correspond to status changes of such a case. We will refer to such process models as flat models. In this book, we adopt this (often hidden) assumption associated to all mainstream process modeling notations. However, it is important to realize that real-life processes are not flat. We use a simple example to illustrate this.