IThaKA: a design pattern for collaborative development of reusable AIML chatbots

This document presents the IThaKA, a comprehensive design pattern for organizing,
developing, and maintaining educational chatbots built with AIML (Artificial Intelligence
Markup Language). The pattern addresses the challenge of building maintainable, reusable,
and collaboratively-developed conversational agents for educational contexts (although it
could be applied in different situations). Emerging from a multi-year university chatbot
project, this pattern integrates architectural organization, content structuring, code economy
techniques, and collaboration practices into a unified approach. The pattern is
platform-agnostic and applicable to any AIML-based chatbot implementation, whether using
Pandorabots, Program-O, or other AIML interpreters.