Zhi# - Programming Language Inherent Support for Ontologies

XML Schema Definition (XSD) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) have been widely used to define programming language independent data types and to conceptualize knowledge. However, writing software that operates on XML instance documents and on ontological knowledge bases still suffers from a lack of compile time support for XSD and OWL. In this paper, a novel compiler framework is presented that facilitates the cooperative usage of external type systems with C#. For the resulting programming language Zhi#, XSD and OWL compiler plug-ins were implemented in order to provide static type checking for constrained atomic value types and ontologies. XSD constraining facets and ontological inference rules could be integrated with host language features such as method overwriting. Zhi# programs are compiled to conventional C# and are interoperable with .NET assemblies

Zhi# OWL Aware Compilation

Abstract. The usefulness of the Web Ontology Language to describe domains of discourse and to facilitate automatic reasoning services has been widely acknowledged. However, the programmability of ontological knowledge bases is severely impaired by the dierent conceptual bases of statically typed object-oriented programming languages such as Java and C# and ontology languages such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL). In this work, a novel programming language is presented that integrates OWL and XSD data types with C#. The Zhi# programming language is the rst solution of its kind to make XSD data types and OWL class descriptions rst-class citizens of a widely-used programming language. The Zhi# programming language eases the development of Semantic Web applications and facilitates the use and reuse of knowledge in form of ontologies. The presented approach was successfully validated to reduce the number of possible runtime errors compared to the use of XML and OWL APIs

Zhi #- Programming Language Inherent Support for Ontologies

Abstract. XML Schema Definition (XSD) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL) have been widely used to define programming language independent data types and to conceptualize knowledge. However, writing software that operates on XML instance documents and on ontological knowledge bases still suffers from a lack of compile time support for XSD and OWL. In this paper, a novel compiler framework is presented that facilitates the cooperative usage of external type systems with C#. For the resulting programming language Zhi#, XSD and OWL compiler plug-ins were implemented in order to provide static type checking for constrained atomic value types and ontologies. XSD constraining facets and ontological inference rules could be integrated with host language features such as method overwriting. Zhi # programs are compiled to conventional C # and are interoperable with.NET assemblies.