Acyclic Visitor
Thanks to Jasper Bekkers, a good friend of mine, the design pattern described in "Possible connector design pattern in c++?" finally has a name. It is actually an Acyclic Visitor combined with an Observer Pattern. The reason why I didn't know of this pattern is because (again, thanks to Jasper for explaining) this pattern was not in the book of GoF and partly because of that it is not wide-spread. I only own two books on design pattern (actually one, since I lent the otherone to another friend) and neither of them described the Acyclic Visitor.
On the website of c2.com there is also a nice link to a pdf in which the original acyclic visitor pattern is designed including code samples. They use dynamic_cast though, while I use typeid. The downside of dynamic_cast is that the cast is not constant while typeid is constant. I do expect however that using typeid is generally slower (especially since i perform a string comparison) but dynamic_cast did not feel natural for me. In retrospect it is rather easy to use dynamic_cast once you accept that once it returns a NULL pointer the casting was incorrect.