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Low-code platforms (latest reincarnation of the long tradition of model-driven engineering approaches) have the potential of saving us countless hours of repetitive boilerplate coding tasks. However, as software systems grow in complexity, low-code platforms need to adapt as well. Notably, nowadays this implies adapting to the modeling and generation of smart software. At the same time, if we want to broaden the userbase of this type of tools, we should also be able to provide more open source alternatives that help potential users avoid vendor lock-ins and give them the freedom to explore low-code development approaches (even adapting the tool to better fit their needs). To fulfil these needs, we are building BESSER, an open source low-code platform for developing (smart) software. BESSER offers various forms (i.e., notations) for system and domain specification (e.g. UML for technical users and chatbots for business users) together with a number of generators. Both types of components can be extended and are open to contributions from the community., Comment: Accepted in Exploring Modeling Methods for Systems Analysis and Development (EMSAD 2024) conference

Tabular data is the most common format to publish and exchange structured data online. A clear example is the growing number of open data portals published by public administrations. However, exploitation of these data sources is currently limited to technical people able to programmatically manipulate and digest such data. As an alternative, we propose the use of chatbots to offer a conversational interface to facilitate the exploration of tabular data sources, including support for data analytics questions that are responded via charts rendered by the chatbot. Moreover, our chatbots are automatically generated from the data source itself thanks to the instantiation of a configurable collection of conversation patterns matched to the chatbot intents and entities., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures