Automatic Recognition of Design Patterns from UML-based Software Documentation

Here we describe a procedure and a prototype implementation for the automatic recognition of Design Patterns from documentation of Software Artefacts' design and implementation, provided in a machine readable form, namely the XMI coded representation of UML diagrams. The procedure exploits a semantic representation of the patterns to be recognized, based on the ODOL ontology defined by the University of Massey (New Zealand) [12], which we have augmented with an OWL-S based representation of the patterns' dynamic behaviour. Both the UML set of diagrams related to the analysed Software Artefacts and the ODOL+OWL-S patterns' representation are automatically scanned and translated into a first order logic representation (namely Prolog). A set of first order logic rules, independent from the specific pattern to be recognized, have been defined to describe the heuristics and features which trigger the recognition, exploiting the Prolog description of the patterns to be recognized and the base of Prolog facts which represents the UML documentation.