Towards the Identification of Architectural Patterns in Component Diagrams Through Semantic Techniques

Component diagrams describe the organisation and connections within a modern computer system at a medium-high level of abstraction. Similarly, Architectural Patterns express the fundamental structure for a software system, providing a set of rules, roles and subsystems, including organisational relationships between them. Providing a semantic-based representation of these two structures can be useful in the construction of a software starting from a more abstract representation towards a real realisation. In this paper a methodology will be illustrated, aiming at building a Semantic-based representation of Architectural Patterns and Component Diagrams, that are used as a base to provide a mapping between Architectural components defined in UML diagrams and Patterns To achieve this result, three different ontologies will be used: the Core Ontology of Software that formalises the most fundamental concepts which are required to model both software components and Web services; the ODOL+OWLs ontology, used to describe Patterns and derived from previous research efforts; the Component Diagram Ontology, which has been expressly created to describe Component Diagrams for this work.