Datenbank-DIALOG and the Relevance of Habitability

This paper describes certain aspects of Datenbank-DIALOG 1 , a German language interface to relational databases developed at the Austrian Research Institute for Artiicial Intelligence. Besides giving a short overview of the system architecture it emphasizes the issues of portability and habitability and how they are being tackled in the design of Datenbank-DIALOG. To demonstrate how design strategies support the development of a habitable system we take examples from the area of comparisons and measures, both of which are important for many application domains and nontrivial from a linguistic point of view. Datenbank-DIALOG has been fully implemented and is accessible worldwide via email coupled to a database containing information about all Austrian AI-projects. Osterreichisches Forschungsinstitut f ur Artiicial Intelligence during the period of development of Da-tenbank-DIALOG 1 The development of Datenbank-DIALOG was carried out jointly with \Software Management GmbH", Vienna and has been sponsored by the Austrian Government within the \Mikroelektronik FF orderungsprogramm, Schwerpunkt S7".