Weaving OML in a general purpose programming language

Abstract

Most existing programming languages can be categorized as general purpose programming languages, meaning that they can be used to implement solutions for any given domain. They are not, in any way, optimized for a specific set of problems. In contrast, Domain Specific Languages (DSL) are used to solve specific problems in a well defined domain. DSL are optimized to a particular set of problems, but they lack support for a wide range of operations that are required when dealing with real world problems. So, in a perfect world, we would like to implement applications using a general purpose programming language, but use a set of different DSL to handle specific domains' tasks. In this paper we describe a DSL named Ontology Manipulation Language (OML), designed to describe operations over with ontologies. Programs can be written using only the OML syntax and be executed independently. OML syntax was designed to deal with ontologies and the language itself is optimized to perform these tasks, which means that other relatively simpler tasks can not be easily done. To overcome this challenge a mechanism was developed so that you can weave small snippets of OML code inside Perl programs, meaning we have the power of OML to manipulate ontologies and, at the same time, all the paraphernalia of modules that Perl offers to handle everything else.