An Approach for Domain-Specific Design Pattern Identification Based on Domain Ontology

In this work, we present an approach for supporting the identification of domain-specific design patterns based on domain’s ontology, since the latter encapsulates the knowledge about the problem domain. More specifically, the proposed approach automatically analyzes the designs of a collection of domain-specific websites in terms of all the recurrent patterns occurring among them, both in the organization of their content and the front-end interface of their pages, resulting in a set of reusable design solutions which are commonly used in them by designers as building blocks for addressing typical domain problems. Then, evaluation is performed according to a number of inspection steps. At a first level, the recurrent patterns occurring at content organization, i.e., the common configurations of domain concepts occurring among website pages are evaluated by matching them against the domain’s ontology and selecting the ones which are in alignment with the domain’s context. At a second level, the recurrent patterns occurring at front-end organization (i.e., the common configurations of front-end design elements) are evaluated towards their consistent and effective use in designs of the collected websites. Finally, the approach categorizes the various reusable design solutions and recommends the ones with the best evaluation results as candidate domain-specific design patterns.