In 2003, in U.S. Patent Application 20030009099, Lett et al disclosed a component-based design pattern that facilitates hierarchical model building and model sharing. In 2009, the Randhawa, Shaffer & Tyson article in Bioinformatics used a very similar approach. While the authors acknowledged that some commercial applications implemented hierarchical composition of model components, they did not know of the public disclosure in application 20030009099. I'm curious if the authors of Smith, Hucka, Hoops et al might comment on similarities and differences between the approaches?
Randhawa R, Shaffer CA, Tyson JJ. Model aggregation: a building-block approach to creating large macromolecular regulatory networks. Bioinformatics 2009;25(24):3289-3295. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btp581.
Article SBML Level 3 package: Hierarchical Model Composition, Versio...