The DISCO DEVELOPMENT SHELL and its Application in the COSMA System

This paper describes the DISCO DEVELOPMENT SHELL, which serves as a basic tool for the integration of natural language components in the DISCO project, and its application in the COSMA system, a Cooperative Schedule Management Agent. Following an object oriented architectural model we introduce a two-step approach, where in the first phase the architecture is developed independently of specific components to be used and of a particular flow of control. In the second phase the "frame system" is instantiated by the integration of existing components as well as by defining the particular flow of control between these components. Because of the object-oriented paradigm it is easy to augment the frame system, which increases the flexibility of the whole system with respect to new applications. The development of the COSMA system will serve as an example of this claim.