A strongly-typed, distributed, run-time system capable of describing and manipulating arbitrarily complex, non-flat, binary data derived from type descriptions in a standard (or slightly extended) programming language, including handling of type inheritance. The system is composed of four primary components. First, a plurality of databases having binary type and field descriptions. Second, a run-time modifiable type compiler that is capable of generating type databases either via explicit API calls or by compilation of unmodified header files or individual type definitions in a standard programming language. Third, a complete API suite for access to type information as well as full support for reading and writing types, type relationships and inheritance, and type fields, given knowledge of the unique numeric type ID and the field name/path. Finally, a hashing process for converting type names to unique type IDs (which may also incorporate a number of logical flags relating to the nature of the type). Further extensions and improvements are also provided as described herein.