Towards an Ontology of Collaboration Patterns

The concept of patterns and pattern languages has been applied in different application domains like software engineering, human computer interaction, and pedagogy. In the area of Collaborative Working Environments (CWE) there are different understandings on what collaboration patterns are and how they can be described and defined. Collaboration patterns are specified at different levels of granularity and in relation to different application contexts. In this article, after introducing the general idea of patterns and its application in the CWE domain, we present an approach for creating a layered ontology in order to integrate collaboration patterns of different granularities and at different levels of abstraction.