Towards A Catalog of Design Patterns Variants With increasing applications of design patterns for the development of quality software applications, the accurate recovery of patterns from software applications remained active research area in the last one and half decade. The implementation variations for standard patterns hamper the accuracy of existing pattern recovery techniques and tools. There is no standard catalog on all variants of Gang of Four(GoF) design patterns in the literature. We present the first catalog on variations of GoF design patterns that are discussed in different publications, blogs and discussion forums at different levels of abstraction. A catalog with 107 variants of standard patterns might serve as a knowledge base for the design pattern research community and it might be helpful to specify GoF patterns and their variants. The critical analysis and observations on GoF design patterns and their variants are presented based on the whole study and our experience.

An Ontology for Security Patterns Security is a fundamental requirement that we must keep in mind when developing a system. We approach the secure construction of software through the use of security patterns, as a way to mitigate their threats. We propose an ontological approach to security patterns, with the aim of adding semantics to the elements that surround security patterns. We have added ontological descriptions to pattern descriptions to make their use more precise, to allow the development of appropriate tools to present to the developer the relevant patterns in each stage and to be able to build better pattern catalogs. A final objective would be the construction of a complete catalog where each pattern includes ontological descriptions. Our contributions are (i) a representation of security patterns in the form of ontology; (ii) examples through queries on the use of the ontology and (iii) a discussion of the possible uses of this ontology for secure software development.