Meta Patterns - A Means for Capturing the Essentials of Object-Oriented Design

There is an undeniable demand to capture already proven and matured object-oriented design so that building reusable object-oriented software does not always have to start from scratch. The term design pattern emerged as buzzword that is associated as a means to meet that goal. Already existing approaches such as the catalog of design patterns of E. Gamma et.al and P. Coad`s object-oriented patterns differ in the applied notoation as well as the way of abstracting from specific application domains. This paper proposes a domain-independent terminology and notation we call meta patterns. It is demonstrated how meta patterns constitute a minimal means to capture reusable object-oriented design.