Using application ontologies for the automatic generation of user interfaces for dialog-based applications

Abstract

The paper presents a data-centric, model driven approach for the automatic generation of user interfaces (UIs) for dialog-based applications using ontological descriptions. It focuses on Interview Applications, a common pattern e.g. for self-service applications in EIS. Existing approaches for the automatic UI generation usually rely on proprietary, UI-specific description models, designed and developed manually for the application in focus. The manual creation of the artefacts leads to a gap in the automated development, i.e. for dialog-based application UIs, where the structure and behavior is driven by the processed data. Furthermore, the UI specific nature of the artefacts impedes their (re-)use in different contexts. The presented approach is a shift away from a UI-specific towards a data-centric method of modelling dialog-based applications, bridging this gap. Application-Ontologies are used as description means, which leads to reusable, sharable model artifacts, applicable to different contexts of use.