A design pattern knowledge base and its application to sequence diagram design

Abstract

A design pattern describes a problem that commonly occurs in software design and provides the core of a tested and proven solution to that problem. It suggests an appropriate object responsibility assignment and provides guidelines on how to make changes in the state of objects in terms of object interaction. This research presents a framework for constructing a design pattern knowledge base. The structures of design patterns are represented using Ontology Web Language (OWL) and the design solutions suggested by design patterns are represented as rules in Java Expert System Shell. We demonstrate how the obtained knowledge base is employed to construct a UML sequence diagram from requirements specified in the form of an operation contract.