Starting from this issue, we will publish one or more feature articles in the first issue of IJSI each year. This paper or these papers will serve the purpose similar to feature articles of some contemporary journals. They will probably not focus on reporting research results of the author(s), but will focus on commenting last year's progress of some selected research domain or subject and looking into the future development of this domain or subject in the coming year. These papers will form a special column which will get the common title "message of the spring". We announce our plan of publishing "message of the spring" also with the purpose of inviting live contributions to this special column. The first message of the spring published in this issue is the paper "Understanding Cognition through Synthesis and Analysis" of Christian Freksa. I hope all of our readers will like it and benefit a lot from it.