Minitrack Introduction

The organizational environment increasingly requires that information systems are capable of meeting changing business needs. This situation is evidenced in the general cost profile of systems development where the bulk of spending and effort lies in the (evolutionary) maintenance, integration and interoperability of existing systems. This situation provides a challenge to the generally accepted approaches to systems development and, in response, one stream of thought seeks to divorce business issues from the underlying technology platforms by placing ´models´ at the heart of systems development. In principle, model-driven approaches see the system development process as consisting only of models and their transformations. A concern for these approaches is that of providing a structure within which models can be developed at the right level of abstraction and can then be transformed into more concrete models. In fundamental terms, however, model-driven development requires significant thinking in relation to both models and the modeling process.