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drawSEM is a visual display and editing tool for conceptual and statistical models in the eXtended Structural Equation Modeling framework. Although drawSEM is designed to be an independent software package not tied to a specific fitting engine, most of the folks working on it are part of the OpenMx team, so we're starting there.

The primary goals of drawSEM are:

• to provide an easy tool to create, visualize, and update path diagrams in the xSEM framework
• to support and develop a common representational language (currently specified in JSON) that can be read by humans (with some work) and by software to support fitting on different architectures and with different back-ends
• to provide integration with common statistical software tools (e.g. R / RMarkdown, OpenMx, lavaan, blavaan, etc.)

Important design notes:

• The schema is primary. drawSEM's core is built around the JSON schema representation, and the software is mostly a viewer and editor. The schema representation is the primary source of truth for any drawSEM model.
• Wherever possible, all model specifications should be visibly noted. drawSEM is a visual builder, so whenever possible all model elements should be visible on screen.