EMISAJ is a community effort and run by volunteers. If you are interested in helping us run the journal, do not hesitate to get in touch with us at eic@emisa-journal.org!

As you may have noticed ;-), the journal website is in need of a major overhaul and a remake. If you are knowledgeable in Web technologies and know how to implement a decent frontend with CSS/HTML, we would truly appreciate your help. We are running EMISAJ on OJS, an open source journal management system which provides means to customise its web frontend.

Submissions to the new section "Report on Tools and Tool Applications" describe and evaluate software tools and tool applications in the journal's areas of interest, e.g., (meta-)modelling tools, tools for M2M- and M2T-transformations, process-aware information systems, process management systems, process engines, software architectures of such tools. A submission to this section should describe and justify the tool design including all relevant design objectives and requirements, design alternatives and decisions and the software architecture. The tool description should focus on the specific features of the tool and relate the tool to other tools and prior related work. It is strongly encouraged that the described tools are openly accessible on the Web (i.e. Libre/Free/Open Source Software at best). If this is not possible, then they have to be made available to the reviewers (contact the editorial office for an arrangement). Submissions to this section are double-blind peer-reviewed by at least two reviewers (with review criteria adapted to this section), and must adhere to scholarly standards in terms of originality, level of abstraction and justification of results.

Guest editors: Tony Clark and Ulrich Frank

Designing software systems for reuse, integration and flexibility requires abstractions such as classification, generalisation, or encapsulation. Traditional modelling and programming languages are usually limited to one classification level only. Therefore, they do not support abstractions that would require additional levels of classification. As a consequence, software designers and programmers are confronted with the problem that they cannot express abstractions that would be useful to satisfy important design goals and to represent patterns of domain concepts. Domain-specific modelling languages offer an attractive perspective on introducing advanced abstractions to foster reuse and flexibility. However, their implementation and use are compromised by restrictions of mainstream programming languages.

Multilevel modelling and programming promise to overcome these limitations by allowing languages, models and instances to co-exist within the same model or program. Multilevel languages increase expressivity and reflective capabilities. In recent years, various languages and tools have demonstrated the potential of this new paradigm. However, research on multilevel modelling and programming languages is still restricted to a relatively small community.

Multilevel approaches offer an opportunity for a new paradigm that can be applied in a wide range of situations. In order to realise the potential of this approach there is need to demonstrate that it is based on sound principles and that it enables more versatile tools which are suited to empower users of future software systems. This special issue is dedicated to provide a platform for researchers and practitioners who work on multilevel languages, models and tools and/or apply them to develop advanced application systems.

Enterprise Modelling and Information Systems Architectures (EMISA) is an international scholarly open access journal with a unique focus on novel and innovative research regarding all aspects of Enterprise Modelling. It allows for supplementing articles with additional material such as models, specifications or tools. We seek contributions that address original aspects of developing languages, language concepts, models, tools and related application systems for multilevel modelling.

Topics of interest for this special issue include, but are not limited to:

• Methods to guide analysis and design of multilevel systems and languages.
• Innovative system architectures enabled by multilevel languages.
• Use of multilevel languages for creating process-modelling languages.
• Formal foundations for multilevel languages.
• Utilizing multilevel languages for enabling models at runtime.
• Tools for multilevel languages.
• Applications of multilevel languages and tools.
• Novel multilevel languages.
• Multilevel extensions to traditional languages.

Submissions:

Submissions to this special issue shall follow the journal's author guidelines for general submissions and will be subject to the regular journal review process. For author guidelines and further information on submitting to EMISA, see

https://www.emisa-journal.org/emisa/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

Important note: Make sure to enter 'SI Multilevel modelling' in the 'Comments to the editor(s)' text field in step 1 of the online submission process. Also please make sure to select the appropriate type of submission (i.e. 'Original Research Contributions' or 'Experience Reports').

Timescales:

(1) Intent to submit: Aug 1, 2016 (via email to ulrich.frank@uni-due.de)
(2) Full submission of article: Oct 31, 2016

The management of continuous business change is complicated by the current lack of effective mechanisms for rapidly responding to multiple change drivers. The use of inadequate change management methods and technologies introduces accidental complexities that significantly drive up the cost, risk, and effort of making changes. These problems provide opportunities for developing and applying organisation modelling approaches that seek to improve an organisation's ability to effectively evolve in response to changes in its business environment.

Modelling an organisation to better support organisational evolution leads to what we call a Model Driven Organisation (MDO), where an MDO is an organisation in which models are the primary means for interacting with and evolving the systems that drive an organisation.

Definition: A Model Driven Organisation uses models in the analysis, design, simulation, delivery, operation, and maintenance of systems to address its strategic, tactical and operational needs and its relation to the wider environment.

An organisation's Enterprise Systems (ES) support a wide-range of business activities including planning, business intelligence, operationalisation, and reporting. ES are thus pivotal to a company's competitiveness. Modelling technologies and approaches that address the development, analysis, deployment and maintenance of ES have started to emerge. Such technologies and approaches must support a much broader collection of use-cases than traditional technologies for systems design modelling. Current ES architectures do not adequately address the growing demands for inter-organisational collaboration, flexibility and advanced decision support in organisations.

Realising the MDO vision will require research that cross-cuts many areas, including research on enterprise architectures, business process. and workflow modelling, system requirements and design modelling, meta-modelling, and models@runtime.

This special issue will bring together articles that describe issues and results relating to achieving the MDO vision. In particular the following issues are deemed in scope:

• Models used to support organisations.
• Model-based simulation of organisations.
• Model-based quality assurance of organisations.
• Achieving organisational agility through models.
• Using models to enhance organisation capability.
• Using models to allow organisation to engage with emerging technologies.
• Using models to understand and analyse organisations.
• Languages and meta-modelling to support organisations.

Submission:

The Guest Editor (Tony Clark, Sheffield Hallam University, UK, t.clark@shu.ac.uk) invites submissions to this special issue that are deemed within scope as described above.

The submissions must follow the journal's guidelines for general submissions and should be either 'Original Research Contributions' or 'Experience Reports' and will be subject to the normal journal review process.

In particular, authors should ensure that they follow the author instructions and style guidelines available from

https://www.emisa-journal.org/emisa/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

Make sure to enter 'SI Towards the Model Driven Organisation (MDO)' in the 'Comments to the editor(s)' text field in step 1 of the submission process.

Timescales:

(1) Intent to submit including abstract: April 1, 2016 (via email to t.clark@shu.ac.uk)
(2) Full submission of article: July 4, 2016
(3) Deadline for first round reviews: Nov 1, 2016

We are pleased to announce that EMISA - An International Journal features DOI for its published articles. The first six DOI have been assigned to articles in the current issue (Vol. 10, No. 1) today:

http://dx.doi.org/10.18417/emisa.10.1.1
http://dx.doi.org/10.18417/emisa.10.1.2
http://dx.doi.org/10.18417/emisa.10.1.3
http://dx.doi.org/10.18417/emisa.10.1.4
http://dx.doi.org/10.18417/emisa.10.1.5
http://dx.doi.org/10.18417/emisa.10.1.6

Today, we released the revised EMISA LaTeX package for authors, version 2.0 at Github. The current development version with bug fixes, new features and the most recent authors instructions is available from Github as well.

The canonical release version of the LaTeX package is available from CTAN at

http://www.ctan.org/pkg/emisa

@Authors: Please use to revised package for manuscript preparation, and let us know your suggestions for improvements. Consult the LaTeX package documentation for author instructions and style guidelines.

The editorial board welcomes Christian Huemer, Technical University of Vienna, Austria as new associate editor.

Do you want to support us in spreading the word about the EMISA journal? We invite you to promote the journal at workshops and conferences related to the journal scope. Please download the new EMISA journal flyer and distribute it, or contact us for nicely printed versions of the flyer for your event (workshop, conference etc.). We gladly send out printed flyers via postal mail.

Welcome to the journal's new website and online submission system. For security reasons, user accounts from the earlier site will not be migrated to emisa-journal.org. Members of the editorial board should contact editorialoffice@emisa-journal.org to obtain their user credentials. All other prior users are asked to register with the new system.

The LaTeX template for preparing submissions to EMISA is currently under development. A revision is scheduled for release in Q4/2015. The revised LaTeX document class will simplify manuscript preparation for authors and will entail detailed author guidelines for using advanced LaTeX features for manuscript preparation. Meanwhile, the initial submission to the journal may either be prepared using the current LaTeX template, or by using another text processing system, e.g. Microsoft Word or LibreOffice.