Spreading Design Patterns with Semantic Web Technologies

Abstract

There are a huge number of design patterns that can be used in specific software domains, not only in object-oriented software design. Several of these collections are disseminated as structured but informal documents, at best supported with hypertext tools on the web. These passive representations compromise usability of design patterns. We proposed to enrich the textual pattern description with semantic annotations that enable a machine and a human understanding, like in the Semantic Web. In this paper, we present an annotation tool to support the development of semantic pattern repositories. Moreover, in order to show the utility of this approach two software tools with different purposes have been developed: a semantic web repository to explore patterns and a pattern wizard to apply patterns into a design toolkit.