Data driven design

I am looking into data-driven design but struggling to get my head around this. What are the best design patterns for designing data-driven attribute system with data-driven abilities that would apply effect on target based on source attributes.

Based on:

- http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/qu...design-pattern-to-apply-effects-and-abilities
- http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/qu...kills-and-abilities-as-commands-good-practice

I feel like command + composite patterns should do with some IO methods to load serialised data.

Any thoughts, suggestions, advice would be highly appreciated.