HyperDE, presented in this dissertation, is a combination of a Model-View- Controller framework and a visual development environment for building prototype applications modeled through the OOHDM and SHDM methods. As a MVC framework, HyperDE provides the reusable and extensible components for the model, vision and control layers, specified as ontologies in RDFS. As a visual development environment, HyperDE provides, through its graphical interface and support tools, an interactive and dynamic way for building and prototyping a hypermedia application, making it possible to visualize the results on each step of the development process. The development architecture promoted by the environment is model-driven, in which the definition of the navigational models effectively generate the application implementation. Using data models based on RDF and RDFS, the navigational models produced in HyperDE can be used as ontologies, through semantic web languages and technologies. Also, the use of a dynamic programming language makes it possible for HyperDE to dynamically generate domain-specific languages for each application built, which results in a programming model much more concise and natural.