101worker is the modular knowledge engineering component of the 101companies project. It has developed maintainability and performance problems due to growing organically, rather than following best software design practices. This thesis lays out these problems, drafts a set of requirements for refactoring the system and then describes and analyzes the resulting implementation. The solution involves collation of scattered and redundant information, setup of unit and functional test suites and incrementalization of the bus architecture of 101worker.
Using semantic data from general-purpose programming languages does not provide the unified experience one would want for such an application. Static error checking is lacking, especially with regards to static typing of the data. Based on the previous work of λ-DL, which integrates semantic queries and concepts as types into a typed λ-calculus, this work takes its ideas a step further to meld them into a real-world programming language. This thesis explores how λ-DL's features can be extended and integrated into an existing language, researches an appropriate extension mechanism and produces Semantics4J, a JastAdd-based Java language semantic data extension for type-safe OWL programming, together with examples of its usage.
