The EMMSAD (Exploring Modeling Methods for Systems Analysis and Development) conference series organized 24 events from 1996 to 2019, associated with CAiSE (Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering). From 2009, EMMSAD has become a two-days working conference. From 2017, EMMSAD best papers are invited to submit extended versions for considering their publication in the Journal of Software and Systems Modeling (SoSyM). The main topics of the EMMSAD series have the focus on models and modeling methods for software and information systems development, requirements engineering, enterprise modeling and architecture, and business process management. The conference further addresses evaluation of modeling methods through a variety of empirical and nonempirical approaches. The aims, topics, and history of EMMSAD can be also found on its website at http://www.emmsad.org/.

1 Scope

This special section follows the 24th edition of the EMMSAD series, organized in conjunction with CAiSE’19 in Rome, Italy, June 2019. The program of this edition introduced five tracks that emphasized the variety of EMMSAD topics: (1) Foundations of Modeling and Method Engineering; (2) Enterprise, Business Process and Capability Modeling; (3) Information Systems and Requirements Modeling; (4) Domain-Specific and Ontology Modeling; and (5) Evaluation of Modeling Approaches. Each track involved two chairs whose aim was to encourage submissions in the relevant topics and help during the decision-making phase of the review process. The accepted papers have been published in [1]. The program further included a keynote given by Jordi Cabot on “Modeling and AI: friends or foes?” and a panel on “Responsible Information Systems—the role of modeling methods”.

2 The papers selected for this special section

This special section presents five papers, where all are the extended versions of papers included in EMMSAD 2019 program. The papers went through a rigid review process of two to three rounds. Below is the list of papers:

  1. 1.

    Azzam Maraee and Arnon Sturm. “Imperative versus declarative constraint specification languages: a controlled experiment”—the article comparatively examines the usage, comprehensibility, and development limitations of Object Constraint Language (OCL) and Java for specifying constraints.

  2. 2.

    Xin Dong, Tong Li, Rui Song, and Zhiming Ding. “Profiling users via their reviews: an extended systematic mapping study”—the article presents a systematic mapping study on review-based user profiling, with an emphasis on identifying current challenges and suggesting a generic analysis process of the profiling.

  3. 3.

    Andreas L. Opdahl and Bjørnar Tessem. “Ontologies for finding journalistic angles”—the article explores how journalistic knowledge graphs can be augmented with support for news topics (“angles”), which can help journalists detect newsworthy events in big data sets and make them relevant and presentable for the intended audience.

  4. 4.

    Drazen Brdjanin, Stefan Ilic, Goran Banjac, Danijela Banjac, and Slavko Maric. “Automatic derivation of conceptual database models from differently serialized business process models”—the article suggests an approach to automatic derivation of conceptual database models from business process models represented by different notations, with particular focus on differently serialized process models; the proposal is implemented using the web-based model-driven tool Amadeos.

  5. 5.

    Alex R. Sabau, Simon Hacks, and Andreas Steffens. “Implementation of a continuous delivery pipeline for enterprise architecture model evolution”—the article proposes a conceptual framework for automated enterprise modeling maintenance, by using the standpoint that the evolution of EA model artifacts shows similarities to the evolution of software artifacts and accordingly leverages the practices of continuous development to practices of EA maintenance.

  6. 6.

    Georgios Koutsopoulos, Martin Henkel, and Janis Stirna. “An analysis of capability meta-models for expressing dynamic business transformation”—the article deals with how organizations are able to facilitate business transformation using capability modeling by reviewing how the concepts relevant to business change have been modeled in existing approaches.