A search system for software patterns based on pattern rank

There are many catalogs of software patterns available on the World Wide Web and literature; however, conventional document search systems are not appropriate for retrieving objective patterns from a number of collected patterns because these systems are not specific to software patterns (e.g., these systems show many pattern documents directly as a search result on a user's query). To solve this problem, we propose a search system for software patterns. Our system is based on both of inter-pattern link analysis and link-based importance calculation method, called "pattern rank". As a result of experimental evaluations for 131 pattern documents, it is found that our system is useful for retrieving patterns that are related to users' intension/requirement by calculating an appropriate importance for each pattern.