ASP-driven User-interaction with Clinguin

2025-02-11

Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science

AI Summary

Answer Set Programming (ASP) developers traditionally rely on external frontend technologies to construct user interfaces, creating a barrier to rapid prototyping and tight integration of declarative logic with interactive behavior. Method: This paper introduces Clinguin, the first system enabling native interactive UI modeling directly within ASP. It extends ASP with declarative UI predicates—such as `ui/2` for interface structure and `on_event/3` for event handling—unifying UI specification and interaction logic under ASP’s logical rule formalism. Built as an extension of Clingo, Clinguin compiles ASP source code directly into dynamic, browser-executable web interfaces. Contribution/Results: Clinguin significantly lowers the UI development threshold for ASP applications: interactive prototypes can be generated from just a few lines of ASP code. The system is fully integrated into the Clingo toolchain and publicly available as open-source software.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Logic Programming
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

We present clinguin, a system for ASP-driven user interface design. Clinguin streamlines the development of user interfaces for ASP developers by letting them build interactive prototypes directly in ASP, eliminating the need for separate frontend languages. To this end, clinguin uses a few dedicated predicates to define user interfaces and the treatment of user-triggered events. This simple design greatly facilitates the specification of user interactions with an ASP system, in our case clingo.

Problem

• ASP-driven user interface design
• Streamlining UI development for ASP developers
• Simplifying user interaction specification in ASP

Innovation

• ASP-driven user interface design
• Eliminates separate frontend languages
• Dedicated predicates for interaction handling