In this chapter, an approach to support the development of ITS based on patterns and pattern catalogues is described. Patterns are means to facilitate inter-project communication. As such, they provide for a clear terminology in an application domain. They support the development process itself by encapsulating information at different levels (e.g. using underlying concepts and tools, adding and integrating new concepts and tools, and fundamentally changing the structure of an existing piece of software).

The approach described in this chapter shows two examples of how a catalogue of patterns collected from existing ITS architectures can be used and re-used in different settings. Those settings span the field of plugin frameworks for ITS (i.e. JaBInT), a concrete “proof of concept” ITS (i.e. ChemNom and CoChemEx) using a collaboration script approach.