Alexander's pattern language has a very strong and intuitively meaningful hierarchical structuring of its patterns, generated from the order of material-architectural space. It runs from the region, thro the urban complex and district, to the cluster of buildings or amenities, and into the detailing of buildings, rooms and discrete inhabitable spaces.
Very few pattern languages since have paid very much attention to structure, and most structures seem at best casual and secondary and at worst ad hoc. Below are examples of structures of pattern languages. Some pattern languages
Category structures of some pattern languages
Some of these category structures are not hierarchical - basically, typologies. Of the ones shown, only Bollier and Helfrich's pattern language of commoning has a set of categories that seem intrinsic to the nature of the domain: they regard commoning as essentially comprising the three designated modes of practice, in a 'dance' of commoning. The Groupworks categories on the other hand - by the admission of the language developers themselves - were a partly-failed attempt to put some domain structure on an aggregation of free-standing practices 'scraped' from a diverse community.
The foprop pattern language of activist life is much more like Alexander's, having what seems to be a hierarchy of top-level constructs. It is in fact a hierarchy of scope (scope of activist vision and reach) rather than a hierarchy of material scale. Warp - Zones of reach and the scope of an activist life
Basic structure of the foprop pattern language - Zones of reach: a hierarchy of scope or granularity
This set of categories is primary in framing this pattern language. But it's not the only system of categories that needs to be deployed when working with this language - and thus, a wiki that holds this constellation of patterns, one-per-page, needs to offer affordances for viewing pages under any of several systems of categories. Categories in a pattern weave
DOT FROM preview-next-diagram STATIC strict digraph { rankdir=LR node [style=filled fillcolor=lightyellow] "Categories in pattern language" node [style=filled fillcolor=lightblue] node [style=filled fillcolor=white] "Categories in pattern language" -> "Category elements within a pattern" "Categories in pattern language" -> "Categories in a system of patterns" "Category elements within a pattern" "Category elements within a pattern" -> "Nested categories in a handbook" "Categories in a system of patterns" "Categories in a system of patterns" -> "Some pattern languages" "Categories in a system of patterns" -> "Warp - Zones of reach and the scope of an activist life" "Categories in a system of patterns" -> "Categories in a pattern weave"}