OntoJIT: Exploiting CLR Compiler Support for Performing Entailment Reasoning over Executable Ontologies

Most recent efforts on bringing ontologies into mainstream programming languages were hindered by some fundamental issues; mainly the lack of expressiveness of programming languages compared to the declarative nature of ontological languages as well as the different assumptions on which reasoning in these languages is based on. In this paper we give the idea of adopting ontological programming approaches a second thought by proposing a prototype for a C# ontological knowledgebase system where ontologies are expressed directly in an executable form. We present our experience on bridging the semantic gab in general purpose programming languages and on exploiting metaprogramming and the dynamic compilation feature of modern compilers for performing certain entailment queries without the need for the bulky ontology classification step usually required in the case of conventional ontological tools.