Innovations in network and information technology have transformed traditional classroom lectures into new approaches that have given universities the opportunity to create a virtual laboratory. However, there is no systematic framework in existing approaches for the development of virtual laboratories. Further, developing a virtual laboratory from scratch is time consuming and costly. This art...

Design patterns provide guidance to system designers on how to structure individual classes or groups of classes, as well as constraints on the interactions between these classes, to enable them to implement flexible and reliable systems. Patterns are usually described informally. While such informal descriptions are useful and even essential, if we want to be sure that designers precisely and ...

Activity is an important concept in many fields, and a number of activity-related ontologies have been developed. While suitable for their designated use cases, these ontologies cannot be easily generalized to other applications. This paper aims at providing a generic ontology design pattern to model the common core of activities in different domains. Such a pattern can be used as a building bl...

The abstraction level of the problem treated by a design pattern has wide variety, from architecture to near implementation. However, there is no objective metric indicating the abstraction level of the problems addressed by patterns. Thus, it is difficult to understand the abstraction level of each pattern and to position a new pattern. In this paper, a metric is proposed. It indicates the rel...

One of the main advantages claimed for software design patterns is improved team communication. This paper reports on an experiment that tests this hypothesis. Team communication among pairs of designers with and without design pattern knowledge is observed in a maintenance setting and analyzed by protocol analysis. The results indicate that shared pattern knowledge leads to a more condensed ex...

Although constructs have been developed for designing the features of Behavior Change Support Systems (BCSSs), detailed descriptions and guidelines for their software level implementation are lacking. Through developing software design patterns one is able to examine BCSSs at a more intricate technical level instead of merely a black-box approach to them. In this paper, we present a software de...

This paper describes the Object with States content ontology design pattern that allows modeling the different states of an object and the restrictions on such object for its different states. It also presents an example of applying the pattern in a concrete use case in the ALM iStack ontology.

In this paper we analyse the use of patterns across a number of fields including architecture, software development and educational technology design. Focusing on the reusability of a pattern outside its area of development, we have identified several issues related to the context and the value system of a pattern. The paper draws together lessons learned from different fields where patterns ar...

Design pattern instance recognition is often done by static analysis, thus approaches are limited to the recognition of static parts of design patterns. The dynamic behavior of patterns is disregarded and leads to lots of false positives during recognition. This paper presents an approach to combine the advantages of static and dynamic analyses to overcome this problem and improve the design pa...

The need for a representation language for ontology design patterns has long been recognized. However, the body of literature on the topic is still rather small and does not sufficiently reflect the diverse requirements on such a language. Herein, we propose a simple but useful and extendable approach which is fully compatible with the Web Ontology Language and should be easy to adopt by the co...