ModelLAND: Where do models come from?

The way in which software systems are produced is radically changing, by increasingly promoting the (re-)use of existent software artifacts. A flourishing of model-based engineering techniques has been defined for building, managing, verifying, validating and controlling software systems. Most approaches build on the assumption that suitable models of software artifacts exist. However, when moving from theory to practice, a question raises up: where do models come from? The thesis of this paper is that there is the need of explore techniques to automatically extract models from existent software. This paper proposes a general overview of the exploring problem and shows two different techniques, tailored to specific domains, to automatically build models (of different nature) from software artifacts.