An OWL/RDF Ontology for Declarative User Interface Generation

Abstract

Maintaining user interfaces for data-intensive applications is costly because interface code is tightly coupled to the underlying domain model: any change to an operation or data schema forces manual updates across multiple layers of the software stack. We present OntologyToUI, a framework that treats ontologies written in OWL (Web Ontology Language)/RDF (Resource Description Framework) as a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for user-interface specification. Five modular base ontologies (schema-level definitions of abstract classes and properties, with no domain-specific instances) define the metamodel, covering communication technologies, external code references, data metadata, business operations, and User Interface (UI) element types. Domain-specific view ontologies, written in Turtle, instantiate the OntologyToUI-UserInterface ontology to declare UI elements. A generic React-based rendering engine interprets view ontologies at runtime through SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) queries and a configuration-driven dispatch table, mapping element types to components without any domain-specific logic. We validate the framework through two case studies developed in the scope of the Smart_LEM project [{Smart_LEM Consortium}, 2022]: a Local Electricity Market management platform, where eleven views were created with zero application-code changes; and a real-time Internet of Things (IoT) dashboard that introduces a new Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT)-subscribed element type, demonstrating the framework’s extensibility.