Incorporating the Ontology Paradigm into a Mainstream Programming Environment

Abstract

The emergence of the Semantic Web have revived the interest in knowledge engineering and ontologies. Different paradigms often share challenges and solutions, and can complement and mutually improve each other. This paper presents a simple and agile integration of ontologies and programming on a small scale, and in a down-to-Earth manner by incorporating the ontology paradigm into a mainstream programming environment. The approach is based on metaprogramming, which has been used to internalize the ontology modeling paradigm into the Clojure language. The resulting DSL, Magic Potion, is implemented in Cojure and blends ontology, functional, object-oriented and concurrent paradigms, which is suitable for general-purpose domain modeling, from technology enhanced learning to business.