The design of multimodal interfaces requires intelligent data interpretation in order to guarantee seamless adaptation to the user’s needs and context. HMI (human-machine interaction) design accommodates varying forms of interaction patterns, depending on what is most appropriate for a particular user at a particular time. These design patterns are a powerful means of documenting reusable design know-how. The semantic modelling framework in this paper captures the available domain knowledge in the field of multimodal interface design and supports adaptive HMIs. A collection of multimodal design patterns is constructed from a diversity of real-world applications and organized into a meaningful repository. This enables a uniform and unambiguous description easing their identification, comprehensibility and applicability.