Mining Domain-Specific Design Patterns

Most catalogues of web design patterns contain patterns of general purpose, making it difficult for developers to properly apply them. This has led to the advent of domain-specific design patterns, encapsulating design experience which is in alignment with the natural constraints of a particular domain. Towards this end, we have developed a methodology which when applied on a collection of websites in a particular domain, leads to the automated identification of domain-specific design patterns. At the level of a single website, the methodology analyzes its conceptual model in terms of the incorporated recurrent patterns and evaluates their consistent use. The identified design patterns are stored in a central repository. By applying the methodology on a set of websites of the same application domain, we can populate a repository containing all the design patterns identified within the various websites designs, categorized towards various aspects such as the domain functionalities they perform. In this work, we focus on the domain of educational websites and present our preliminary results.