Semantic Object-Oriented Programming (SOOP)

Currently, the interaction between ontologies and general purpose programming languages mostly consists of an indirect mapping between the ontology and the programming language. The language and libraries are often basically used as a programmable ontology editor. In this paper we present a different approach that creates an ontology from regular data objects in a (statically typed) mainstream language (C++). Because in our case the mapping is going from object-oriented programming (OOP) language to the ontology, we can avoid many problems that approaches going into the opposite direction have to face. Furthermore, the interaction between the domains becomes more straight forward and can be mostly kept free of uncommon language constructs. The declarative programming paradigm on the one hand and the (object-oriented) imperative paradigm on the other hand are in this manner combined into the Semantic Object-Oriented Programming (SOOP) paradigm. As a result, SOOP allows programmers to directly use semantic technologies, especially reasoners, for their usual language objects from within C++.