Ontology-Based Design Pattern Selection

The software design phase is important and challenging due to its high impact on other phases of the software development life cycle. Design patterns are proven solutions based on software developers' experience to solve recurring problems, which used to acquire quality software design. However, selecting an appropriate design pattern is quite difficult. Hence, many studies have been done to automate the design pattern selection process. The existing automated design pattern selection methodologies have certain issues such as the need to have a large sample size, user restrictions on selecting preset concepts, time-consuming, and incomprehensiveness. To address these issues in this paper, a two-phase method for selecting an appropriate design pattern is presented. The proposed method is based on an ontology approach that enables domain knowledge to be modeled in a simple and abstract way and enables queries to be evaluated against a knowledge base. The concepts of ontology are then linked to WordNet. Subsequently, a dataset includes use cases that can be satisfied with GOF design patterns is provided. The set of use cases is then processed in such a way as to make it easy and fast to select the concept-constraint pair to query the ontology. The experimental shows promising and effective results of the proposed method.