Programming Language Inherent Support for Constrained XML Schema Definition Data Types and OWL DL

Recently, the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and XML schema definition (XSD) have become ever more important when it comes to conceptualize knowledge and to define programming language independent type systems. However, writing software that operates on ontological data and on XML instance documents still suffers from a lack of compile time support for OWL and XSD. Especially, obeying lexical- and value space constraints that may be imposed on XSD simple data types and preserving the consistency of assertional ontological knowledge is still error prone and laborious. Validating XML instance documents and checking the consistency of ontological knowledge bases according to given XML schema definitions and ontological terminologies, respectively, requires significant amounts of code. This paper presents novel compile time- and code generation features, which were implemented as an extension of the C# programming language. Zhi# provides compile time-and runtime support for constrained XML schema definition simple data types and it guarantees terminological validity for modifications of assertional ontological data