Preface

The rapid growth of organizational and business processes data, managed via information systems, has made available a big variety of information that consequently created a high demand for making data analytics more effective and valuable. The seventh edition of the International Symposium on Data-Driven Process Discovery and Analysis (SIMPDA 2017) was conceived to offer a forum where researchers from different communities can share their insights in this hot new field. As a symposium, SIMPDA fosters exchanges among academic research, industry, and a wider audience interested in process discovery and analysis. The event is organized by the IFIP WG 2.6. This year the symposium was held in Neuchatel, Switzerland.
Submissions cover theoretical issues related to process representation, discovery, and analysis or provide practical and operational examples of their application. To improve the quality of the contributions, the symposium is structured for fostering discussion and stimulating improvements. Papers are pre-circulated to the authors, who are expected to read them and make ready comments and suggestions. After the event, authors have the opportunity to improve their work extending the presented results. For this reason, authors of accepted papers were invited to submit extended articles to this post-symposium volume. We received 19 submissions and six papers were accepted for publication in this volume.
The current selection of papers underlines the most relevant challenges that were identified and proposes novel solutions for facing these challenges.