CSDL: a language for cooperative systems design

The aim of a cooperative system is to coordinate and support group activities. Cooperative Systems Design Language (CSDL) is an experimental language designed to support the development of cooperative systems from specification to implementation. In CSDL, a system is defined as a collection of reusable entities implementing floor control disciplines and shared workspaces. CSDL tries to address the difficulties of integrating different aspects of cooperative systems: Cooperation control, communication, and system modularization. This paper presents CSDL as a specification language. Basic units are coordinators that can be combined hierarchically. A coordinator is composed of a specification, a body, and a context. The specification defines the cooperation policy; the body controls the underlying communication channels; and the context defines coordinators' interaction in modular systems. © 1994, IEEE