Improving Design Pattern Adoption with an Ontology-Based Repository

In software engineering, an efficient approach towards reuse has become a crucial success factor. Conceptual simple high level approaches to reuse are the most appropriate for performing it in a useful manner. Design patterns are reliable and an effective high level approach that enables developers to produce high quality software in less time. Unfortunately, the rapidly growing number of design patterns has not yet been adequately supported by efficient search and management tools, making the patterns uninviting for a large part of the software development community. In this way, the issue of managing and selecting design patters in a straight-forward way has become the main challenge. In this paper, we propose a possible solution for the improvement of design pattern adoption and present a platform that should give design patterns some new and long-overdue momentum. Using our proposed technique for formal design pattern specifications, we have developed an experimental prototype of a new design pattern repository based on semantic web technologies. A new Ontology-Based Design Pattern Repository (OBDPR) has been developed that can also be used as a platform for introducing advanced services. Some fundamental services - searching, design pattern proposing, verification and training services - have already been developed and many others are proposed. Based on the conducted experiments, it is our strong belief that the proposed approach together with the platform's potential - can significantly contribute to the improvement of design pattern adoption.