F# Type Providers: DBpedia and the Combinator Framework

Wikipedia has become a knowledge repository for virtually every topic in existence, but its pages are intended to be read by humans, not computers. The DBpedia organisation has extracted much of this knowledge into an RDF-based entity graph format, and we introduce and demonstrate a type provider that brings this knowledge into the F# language in a strongly typed way. High quality type providers require a significant development effort. To address this we discuss an experimental framework to help build type providers compositionally from reusable components. In particular, we describe and demo a chaining combinator that links two or more existing type providers. A significant portion of this talk will be a live demo of the aforementioned type provider technologies.