Specifying Object-Oriented Design Patterns using OWL

Abstract

Design patterns provide good solutions for problems occurred in the design stage. Using design patterns in the software development processes helps improve productivity and quality of software products. Pattern Oriented Analysis and Design Process has four steps related to patterns, namely the acquaintance with design patterns in the pattern library, the retrieval of the pattern candidate, the selection of suitable patterns and the application of selected patterns. It is necessary to have a method to specify patterns in a machine understandable form to automate the above four steps. Some works have tried to specify the structural aspects of design patterns by ontology. We add the specification of the behavior aspects into design pattern ontology so that this ontology can be used to automate steps in the Pattern Oriented Analysis and Design Process.