1. A system for the extraction of data from a variety of sources into a single unifying ontology, comprising: a) an ontology based environment, such environment including an ontology description language (ODL) and a run-time accessible types system; b) logically connected thereto, an extensible parsing environment, wherein such parsing environment supports customized reverse-polish plug-in operators; c) logically connected thereto, a configurable outer parser capable of accepting a BNF (or equivalent) specification describing the source data format; d) an embedded inner parser capable of executing statements and performing actions directly on the objects and types described by the system ontology.