DC2DP: A Dublin Core Application Profile to Design Patterns

Design patterns describe reusable solutions to existing problems in object-oriented software development. Design patterns are mostly documented in written form in books and scientific papers, which hinders processing them via computer, their diffusion, and their broader reuse. They can also be found on the internet, though documented with little detail, which makes it hard to understand and consequently reuse them. This paper presents an application profile of the Dublin Core metadata standard specific for design patterns, called DC2DP. The goal is to allow design patterns to be documented so as to provide the user with a more detailed and standardized description, besides enabling automatic processing through web services. The paper also extends an Analysis Patterns Reuse Infrastructure (APRI) by adding a design pattern repository to it, thus allowing these patterns to be cataloged and searched, which makes their discovery, study, and reuse easier.