2026-07-28T23:36:25Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:26712 2026-07-28T09:32:41Z ddc:004 open_access

An OWL/RDF Ontology for Declarative User Interface Generation da Costa, Daniel Theisges Costa, Júlio Matos, Paulo Jorge Teixeira Corti, Ramon Gallinad Vilanova Arbos, Ramon Pereira, Maria João Varanda OWL RDF domain-specific language user interface generation model-driven engineering React SPARQL MQTT 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. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Daniel Theisges da Costa and Júlio Costa and Paulo Jorge Teixeira Matos and Ramon Gallinad Corti and Ramon Vilanova Arbos and Maria João Varanda Pereira 2026 Is Part Of OASIcs, Volume 144, 15th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2026) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2026.14 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-267120 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2026.14 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode