Identify MVC architectural pattern based on ontology

Abstract

MVC architectural pattern is widely used in software architecture design. It helps decouple the processing and the visualization of system data. Identified MVC architectural pattern helps understand how the software is actually implemented based on MVC architectural pattern, and further improve the consistency between design and source code. This paper proposes an ontology-based MVC architectural pattern identification method. Firstly, we use the combination of design patterns to describe the structure of MVC architectural pattern, so as to construct the MVC ontology of concept layer. Then we construct a program dependency graph by extracting the dependencies between entities in the target system, and build the ontology of instance layer. Finally, the MVC architectural pattern ontology of the specific target system is inferred by ontology reasoner in order to obtained MVC architectural pattern and the pattern elements included in each component. We use open source projects as the benchmark, and the experimental results show that our method effectively identify the MVC architectural pattern and the pattern elements in software system.