J. Blanchette, F. Bordeleau, A. Pierantonio, N. Kosmatov, G. Taentzer, M. Wimmer: Introduction to the STAF 2015 special section, Software and Systems Modeling, TBD (2018), TBD, pages 1 - 10. doi: 10.1007/s10270-018-0686-1
Software Technologies: Applications and Foundations (STAF) is a federation of a number of leading conferences on software technologies. It provides a loose umbrella organization for practical software technologies conferences. In 2015 the STAF federated event has been held in L’Aquila (Italy) with a special focus on practical and foundational aspects of software technology, from object-oriented design, testing, mathematical approaches to modeling and verification, model transformation, graph transformation, model-driven engineering, aspect-oriented development, and tools. Besides the main and satellite events (14 overall), three conferences:
•The International Conference on Model Transformation (ICMT 2015)
•The European Conference on Modelling Foundations and Applications (ECMFA 2015)
•The International Conference on Tests & Proofs (TAP 2015)
collected papers on relevant topics of software and system modeling and verification techniques; among them, 10 papers have been selected and extended to be part of this special section.
The International Conference on Model Transformation (ICMT) is the premier forum for researchers and practitioners from all areas of model transformation. Model transformation encompasses a variety of technical spaces, including modelware, grammarware, dataware, and ontoware, a variety of model representations, e.g., based on different types of graphs, and a variety of transformation paradigms including rule-based transformations, term rewriting, and manipulations of objects in general-purpose programming languages, to mention just a few.