University of New Orleans ScholarWorks@UNO University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations Dissertations and Theses 12-20-2009 An ontology-based approach to Automatic Generation of GUI for Data Entry Fangfang Liu University of New Orleans Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td Recommended Citation Liu, Fangfang, "An ontology-based approach to Automatic Generation of GUI for Data Entry" (2009). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. 1094. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1094 This Thesis is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by ScholarWorks@UNO with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Thesis in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. This Thesis has been accepted for inclusion in University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UNO. For more information, please contact [email protected]. An ontology-based approach to Automatic Generation of GUI for Data Entry A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science by Fangfang Liu B.A. Dalian University of Technology, China, 2006 December 2009 @Copyright 2009, Fangfang Liu ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT First, I would like to give thanks to my advisor Dr.Tu. Without his help, I can not finish the thesis project and the paper. I appreciate all the ideas and help he offered me. I also thank my project partner Sirisha Tankasala. With her help and cooperation, we can get some good user interface display for expressing the approach. I also would like to thank Dr. Roussev , Dr. Richard III to be part of my defense committee members. Lastly, I would like to thank all my friends and my parents who give me so much love and encouragement. iii Table of Contents LIST OF FIGURES ..........................................................................................................................v ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................................vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2 BACKGROUND ........................................................................................................4 2.1 Overview of Semantic Web Service .......................................................................................4 2.1.1 What is Semantic Web Service ........................................................................................4 2.1.2 The Hierarchy of the semantic web .................................................................................5 2.2 Overview of Jena2 ..................................................................................................................7 2.2.1 The framework of Jena ....................................................................................................8 2.2.2 Jena Ontology API ...........................................................................................................9 2.3 Overview of Protégé .............................................................................................................12 CHAPTER 3 DESIGN....................................................................................................................14 3.1 Problem Statement................................................................................................................14 3.2 Design Overview ..................................................................................................................15 3.3 API design based on Jena......................................................................................................16 3.4 Persistent Layer Design ........................................................................................................17 3.5 SPARQL Query Design ........................................................................................................20 CHAPTER 4 IMPLEMENTATION ...............................................................................................22 4.1 Understanding of Business Processes...................................................................................22 4.2 The Ontology and OWL file .................................................................................................23 4.3 Implementation of Customized Java library using Jena API ................................................24 4.4 Generate tree-like view GUI selector....................................................................................25 4.4.1 Memory view of owl file ...............................................................................................27 4.4.2 Database persistent view of OWL file ...........................................................................30 4.4.3 Column View of OWL file.............................................................................................32 CHAPTER 5 RELATED WORK ...................................................................................................35 CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK..................................................................37 REFERENCE .................................................................................................................................38 APPENDIX.....................................................................................................................................39 VITA ...............................................................................................................................................57 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2- 1.................................................................................................................................5 Figure 3- 1...............................................................................................................................15 Figure 3- 2...............................................................................................................................18 Figure 3- 3...............................................................................................................................19 Figure 3- 4...............................................................................................................................19 Figure 4- 1...............................................................................................................................22 Figure 4- 2...............................................................................................................................23 Figure 4- 3...............................................................................................................................24 Figure 4- 4...............................................................................................................................24 Figure 4- 5...............................................................................................................................26 Figure 4- 6...............................................................................................................................26 Figure 4- 7...............................................................................................................................30 Figure 4- 8...............................................................................................................................33 Figure 4- 9...............................................................................................................................34 Figure 5- 1...............................................................................................................................35 v ABSTRACT This thesis reports an ontology-based approach to automatic generation of highly tailored GUI components that can make customized data requests for the end users. Using this GUI generator, without knowing any programming skill a domain expert can browse the data schema through the ontology file of his/her own field, choose attribute fields according to business’s needs, and make a highly customized GUI for end users’ data requests input. The interface for the domain expert is a tree view structure that shows not only the domain taxonomy categories but also the relationships between classes. By clicking the checkbox associated with each class, the expert indicates his/her choice of the needed information. These choices are stored in a metadata document in XML. From the viewpoint of programmers, the metadata contains no ambiguity; every class in an ontology is unique. The utilizations of the metadata can be various; I have carried out the process of GUI generation. Since every class and every attribute in the class has been formally specified in the ontology, generating GUI is automatic. This approach has been applied to a use case scenario in meteorological and oceanographic (METOC) area. The resulting features of this prototype have been reported in this thesis. Keywords: Ontology, Graphic user interface, OWL/RDF, Jena vi CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION When the graphical user interfaces