Toward an Hypermedia Design Patterns Space

Finding hypermedia design patterns is becoming a new trend in hypermedia design. However, as in other domains, especially in software engineering and objectoriented design, too much increase without control in proposing hypermedia design patterns is going against the purpose of design patterns that is to provide easily reusable solutions to identified problems. The reason is that the metaknowledge about hypermedia design patterns is not yet well organized. Since hypermedia engineering is by nature a multidimensional space, hypermedia design patterns may take their meaning according to several dimensions. Thereby this position paper proposes some directions for organizing the space of hypermedia design patterns and analyzing their use, thus promoting their effective use during design and possibly identifying not yet known design patterns. Our aim is to provide a basis of discussion for hypermedia design patterns description and use.