We are pleased to present this special issue, which contains extended versions of selected papers from the Fifth International Conference of Software Language Engineering (SLE ’12). The conference was held in Dresden, Germany on September 26–28, 2012. The SLE conference series is devoted to a wide range of topics related to artificial languages in software engineering. SLE is an international research forum that brings together researchers and practitioners from both industry and academia to expand the frontiers of software language engineering. SLE’s foremost mission is to encourage and organize communication between communitiesT6D that have traditionally looked at software languages from different, more specialized, and yet complementary perspectives. SLE emphasizes the fundamental notion of languages as opposed to any realization in specific technical spaces.
We invited the authors of eight papers included in the SLE ’12 conference proceedings to submit extended versions of their papers to this special issue. We based these invitations on the high scores that these papers received during the conference-submission review process. All submissions to this issue were subject to a thorough review process with at least three reviewers per submission. Each accepted paper underwent at least one revision based on the reviewers’ comments. As a final result, this issue includes seven papers, which span the three major themes of SLE ’12: modelware, grammarware, and ontologywareT3E.
We are grateful to the many anonymous reviewers for their service in reviewing the submissions and their invaluable comments. We also thank the authors for undertaking the effort to extend the contributions and improving them based on the reviewers’ feedback. The dedication of the authors and the reviewers helped ensure the high quality of this special issue.
We hope that you will enjoy this compilation of extended papers from SLE ’12.
