A design patterns catalog for web-based emergency management systems

The design of domain specific information systems, like Emergency Management Systems, has to rely on the participation of experts with different backgrounds. Such multi-disciplinary process is often characterized by misunderstandings and communication problems. In this context, design patterns might be a useful tool to communicate ideas since patterns collect solutions to recurrent problems in a domain using a language that should be understandable by a general audience with no technical knowledge. In this paper we introduce a catalog of design patterns for Web-based Emergency Management Systems (WEMS). We have used three sources to find out patterns: design principles for WEMS, existing WEMS and design patterns from related design areas including interaction, ubiquitous computing or security. Furthermore, the catalog is deployed as a collaborative web application so that designers can navigate through the patterns space but they can also make the collection grow adding their own expertise. © Springer-Verlag 2010.