Disseminating Usability Design Knowledge through Ontology-Based Pattern Languages

Usability patterns represent knowledge about known ways to design graphical user interfaces that are usable and meet the needs and expectations of users. There is currently a plethora of usability patterns published in books, private repositories and the World-Wide Web. The dominance of pattern discovery efforts has neglected the emerging need to organize the patterns so they can become a proactive resource for developing interfaces. This paper presents an approach using Semantic Web concepts that turns informal patterns into formal representations capable of supporting systematic design methods. Through this method, loosely coupled pattern collections can be turned into strongly coupled pattern languages that help organize usability knowledge into a form that is easily and widely disseminated. This in turn can be used to facilitate the accumulation of usability development knowledge