Automatic Recognition of Design Patterns from UML-based Software Documentation

Here we describe a procedure and a prototype implementa- tion for the automatic recognition of Design Patterns from documentation of Software Artefacts’ design and implemen- tation, 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 rec- ognized, based on the ODOL ontology defined by the Univer- sity of Massey (New Zealand) [12], which we have augmented with an OWL-S based representation of the patterns’ dy- namic 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 recog- nition, exploiting the Prolog description of the patterns to be recognized and the base of Prolog facts which represents the UML documentation.