We propose a set of architectural patterns that describe a large variety of neuro-symbolic systems. As in other areas of computer science (knowledge engineering, software engineering, ontology engineering, process mining and others), such design patterns provide a unified vocabulary to describe a large variety of systems, help to systematise the literature, clarify which combinations of techniques serve which purposes, and encourage re-use of software components. We have validated our set of compositional design patterns against a large body of recent literature, and we apply them to a number of systems described in the different sections of this volume.

Sections 1.1-1.7 of this chapter are based on our earlier publications [1] and [2], the new contributions of this chapter are in section 1.5 and 1.6.