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This article provides a summary of the current state of the Software & Systems Modeling (SoSyM) journal in 2023. It highlights the publication of new papers and the addition of new editors to the journal. The retirement of two esteemed editors is also mentioned, with gratitude expressed for their contributions. The article includes statistics on the number of papers published, the impact factor of the journal, and the number of submissions and downloads. It announces the recipients of the journal's ten-year most influential paper awards and lists the papers presented at the MODELS conference. The article concludes by expressing appreciation to the reviewers for their contributions. Additionally, a separate document is a message of gratitude and recognition from the software and systems modeling community. The community expresses their appreciation to all the reviewers who have assisted the modeling community and announces the recipients of the Best Reviewers of 2023 award. The document also provides a list of all the reviewers who contributed their expertise to the journal over the past year. The content of the current issue is briefly mentioned, and the community wishes everyone a joyful New Year and encourages readers to explore the journal's archive. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, which were adopted by all member states in 2015. These goals aim to address pressing global issues such as poverty, health, education, inequality, economic growth, climate change, and environmental preservation. The article suggests that the field of modeling, particularly in computer science and software engineering, can play a significant role in understanding and predicting the impact of changes related to these goals. It emphasizes the need for robust and integrated models that can capture the complexity and interactions of the SDGs, and calls for further research and development in this area. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the challenges faced by researchers and practitioners in the field of modeling and modeling language design. It highlights the differences in interpretation that can arise from the same syntactic construct used in different contexts. The authors propose adopting the concept of a function as an underlying semantic paradigm to connect and unify the various interpretations and views represented through different modeling techniques. They suggest that integrating the functional paradigm with data structures could provide a helpful and generally usable solution. However, there is still a challenge in integrating continuously changing flows with discrete and event-based flows. The authors call for mathematicians to improve the theories and allow modelers to use the functional paradigm at an abstraction level that is efficient for modeling systems and software. [Extracted from the article]

Research Software Engineering is the use of Software Engineering practices to support the software needs when conducting research [Wikipedia, July 2023]. Software Engineering was made prominent when F. L. Bauer hosted the first conference on Software Engineering in 1968 to address the general software crisis that was identified in the 1960s. Similar to the original term "software engineering", the creation of the subfield "Research Software Engineering" (RSE) was necessary because there is an ongoing crisis in the development of software that supports research activities. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the concept of modularity in software and systems modeling. It highlights the benefits of modularity, such as the ability to exchange and evolve implementations without modifying dependent code, supporting parallel development and reuse of external libraries, and improving code comprehensibility. However, the article points out that modern modeling languages lack well-understood, encapsulating interfaces for defined models, leading to a lack of reusable libraries. The authors propose an alternative approach that involves individually storing artifacts, managing them through a version control system, and connecting them through explicit use of symbols in model interfaces. They call for further exploration of modularity concepts in modeling languages like SysML, UML, and domain-specific languages. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the use of model-based code generation and its limitations. While there have been successful industrial projects that have used code generation from abstract models, the widespread adoption of code generation from explicitly defined models has not been as successful. The article identifies several challenges, including developers' ability to think in abstract form, the limitations of existing tooling, the need for flexible adaptation of the generator, and weak tool support for defining abstraction levels in a model. The article suggests that a "smart" generator could address these challenges by generating code for various functionalities, such as data transportation, user interfaces, logging, and search functionality. However, the article acknowledges that current code generators are not yet capable of such smartness and that more work is needed in this area. [Extracted from the article]

The article titled "How does your model represent the system? A note on model fidelity, underspecification, and uncertainty" discusses the concept of model representativity in the field of model-driven engineering (MDE). The authors highlight the importance of understanding how well a model represents the system it is intended to depict. They introduce the concepts of fidelity and underspecification as ways to qualify the representativity relationship between a model and the system. The article emphasizes the need to address uncertainty in modeling and suggests incorporating mechanisms to accept and handle ontological uncertainty within the design models. The authors argue that explicitly reasoning about model representativity is crucial for accurate evaluation results and for scenarios such as model composition and substitutability. The article concludes by calling for more contributions in this area to make MDE successful. [Extracted from the article]

We wonder - how many SoSyM readers have tried using OpenAI's ChatGPT to formulate prompts to explore the interesting results that may be produced? The example of GraphGPT suggests that a language designer can tell ChatGPT what the desired modeling language looks like and it will produce pieces within that language. Less bold alternatives could be that ChatGPT is leveraged partially as a kind of recommender or modeling assistant, but still lets the modeler be responsible and the final owner of the produced models. [Extracted from the article]

Graph Inaugural SoSyM Meeting: October 2002 in Dresden, Germany (Heinrich in second row, far-right) Heinrich, we miss you. At the end of September 2022 at RWTH Aachen, Germany, there was a meeting attended by several experts on software language development with a specific emphasis on modeling. In memory of Heinrich Hussmann (inaugural SoSyM editor) This issue is a memorial to Heinrich Hussmann, our long-time friend and SoSyM editor. [Extracted from the article]

For a 2012 editorial [[1]], the relationships between modeling and programming languages were discussed. However, models sometimes also serve different purposes that programming languages do not handle well or not at all, which is why modeling languages for software development are needed. Considering these differences, shared characteristics, and uses of programming and modeling, it is obvious that there is one technical difference: a programming language is a coherent, clearly defined and relatively stable homogeneous language. [Extracted from the article]

Large Language Models (LLM), such as the variants of ChatGPT or BERT, are currently under intensive development and enhancement, but it has become clear that they will contribute a significant change to the way text and images are created in the future. Although there is much to learn from the emergence of this technology, it is becoming more evident how the usage of LLMs may impact the way we develop software and software intensive systems. [Extracted from the article]

Currently, we also can find requirements-capturing languages that are a mixture between traditional natural languages and structurally constrained textual languages, which can be regarded as precise modeling languages in a textual syntactic form. The ideas of grammars and related lexicographic definitions were transferred from the natural language context to the first computer languages, namely programming languages and specification languages, where it received much more precision. Although modeling is used in almost all science and engineering disciplines, the explicit definition of modeling languages is an invention of modern computing technology. [Extracted from the article]

In: I Journal on Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM) i , Volume 19, Issue 3, pp. 763-784, Springer, May 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-019-00770-9 Nicolas Hili, Mojtaba Bagherzadeh, Karim Jahed, and Juergen Dingel. In: I Journal on Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM) i , Volume 19, Issue 6, pp. 1483-1587, Springer, November2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-020-00806-5 Changes to the editorial board Each year, Editors who served the SoSyM community for many years retire from the SoSyM Editorship with distinction of service and our deep appreciation. In: I Journal on Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM) i , Volume 20, Issue 1, Springer, January 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-020-00804-7 Stefan Götz, Matthias Tichy, and Raffaela Groner. [Extracted from the article]

We are delighted to bring you this first issue of SoSyM for 2020! The six SoSyM issues published in 2019 contained 74 Regular papers, 2 Overview papers, 32 Special Section papers, 17 Theme Section papers, 2 Expert Voices, and 8 Guest Editorials. This is the highest Impact Factor since the inception of SoSyM, which we believe offers evidence to the growing interest in software and systems modeling as a research discipline and to SoSyM's important role in the modeling research community. [Extracted from the article]

However, many aspects in the interplay between state machines and other types of models are unclear in current modeling languages, such as UML and SysML. If the reuse of models can be standardized in specific domains, then model-based software and systems engineering will progress with even more breakthroughs. [Extracted from the article]

We also recommend that tool developers use the results and findings of this formally precise semantics to verify their context condition checkers, tool analyses and code syntheses against this semantics. Because only certain aspects of the language semantics can be described using a class diagram on the "meta-level", another possibility is to specify the semantics of a model by describing the effects during its execution in the form of interpretation. And to overcome the tool vendor and other stakeholder bias:Ask researchers to identify optimal language syntax and semantics design. [Extracted from the article]

A key open question is, I How and to what extent do the software models of the digital twin relate to the engineering models of the physical system? For example, collecting data in digital shadows is one possibility, but if the internal structure or the desired behavior of a physical component is not known, it is more difficult to evaluate the collected and aggregated data than if the collected data are compared to the intended outcome documented in the engineering models. Engineering models are also a good way to connect the collected sensor data to their original sources. [Extracted from the article]

The focus remained on the development of software, but because software usually is embedded in a social, technical, or business context, various domains inside and related to informatics were more deeply involved. The above questions were discussed not only for the UML standard, which had at that time become relatively stable (and incomplete in terms of practical adoption, with many existing UML tools only partially satisfying many of the users needs). We can safely state that since the early UML discussions at OOPSLA in the 1990s and the start of the MoDELS/UML series of conferences, models and modeling languages have become the subject of study of research on their own, leading to hundreds of Ph.D. dissertations across the world. [Extracted from the article]

Furthermore, some constructs that class diagrams offer, such as multiplicities, are not well-represented in the typical ontology approaches, but also the idea of rule-based derivation of knowledge is not present in class diagrams. The application of ontologies toward various engineering domains has gained much momentum recently, such that it is beneficial to understand the relationship between ontology building and modeling. The UML (which not only contains class diagrams, but also provides a set of behavior modeling techniques, a logic language, and a precisely standardized syntax) is easily able to cover the language constructs that typical ontology approaches provide. [Extracted from the article]

However, many of the existing modeling techniques, methods and practices of Software Engineering are often ignored because of an assumption that software need not be developed in the future as in the past. Previous editorials highlighted the use of models and the activity of modeling as an integral part of almost all development activities for complex systems. Software Engineering already provides many modeling techniques to address complexity and architectural structure. [Extracted from the article]

This editorial reflects some observations from discussions at the MODELS 2021 conference and its workshops, which were held virtually in Japan during the period of October 10-15, 2021. Furthermore, it may be that when encoding a reference model within a given modeling language, we actually define some kind of ontology (e.g., including a set of terms and their relations) within that modeling language. This seems to fit the definition of a reference model because such a model should be a reference for many (similar) systems, even though there is typically a concretization development step between the definition of the reference model and the finalization of the system. [Extracted from the article]

The immaturity of tool support for UML in its early history is also a well-known limitation that hampered the full achievement of the original goals of the UML. The UML was originally designed as a high-level abstract modeling language to define architecture, capture requirements, effectively model tests, and allow tools to trace high-level requirements down to code. Because software is an intrinsic part of all kinds of innovative systems, we can also expect a need for modeling the software part within these systems, which may give the UML and UML-related modeling languages a new push. [Extracted from the article]