Summary of the W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group's face to face meeting, Boston, January 24-26, 2007

The W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group [1] met in Boston
Massachusetts, USA on January 24-26, 2007,  hosted by the W3C as part of the
Multi-Group Meeting. A joint session was held on January 24 with the W3C
Voice Browser Working Group.

Our main focus in this face to face meeting was on working out examples of
how MMI applications can be authored using tools such as SCXML [2] (for
Interaction Management), VoiceXML (as a voice modality) and XHTML (as a GUI
modality), with user inputs represented in EMMA [3]. Our goals are to
exercise the Multimodal Architecture [4] and identify any architectural
issues that emerge from considering these examples.

Some of the specific issues we discussed were: data synchronization, focus
synchronization, accessing and manipulating EMMA results, canonicalizing
data representations, handling media streams, and possible MMI extensions to
SCXML.

We plan to put together a demonstration exemplifying how the Multimodal
Architecture can be used to implement applications and we began considering
some architectural and functional considerations for the demo.

We also reviewed changes in the EMMA spec that were made in response to
comments from the Voice Browser WG [5].

We finalized some technical issues in preparation for a second Last Call
Working Draft, which we intend to publish in March. The Last Call Working
Draft will be followed shortly by the Candidate Recommendation, at which
point we will be looking for reports of implemented EMMA systems. The main
change since the previous Last Call Working Draft was a revision in how
annotations from individual EMMA results are represented in composite EMMA
documents. We also modified the names of some mode attributes to make them
more compatible with related VoiceXML concepts.

During our joint meeting with the Voice Browser Working Group on Wednesday
we discussed the W3C Backplane[6], and how it relates to applications that
include voice. We also discussed recent developments in SCXML.

The next face to face meeting will be held June 18-20 in Roncade (Treviso)
Italy, hosted by H-Care.

Best Regards,

Debbie Dahl
MMI Working Group Chair

[1] Multimodal Interaction Working Group: http://www.w3.org/2002/mmi/
[2] SCXML: http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-scxml-20060124/
[3] EMMA: http://www.w3.org/TR/emma/
[4] MMI Architecture: http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-mmi-arch-20060414/
[5] VB comments on EMMA:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-multimodal/2006Apr/0000.html
[6] backplane: http://www.w3.org/2006/11/backplane/

Received on Friday, 16 March 2007 21:21:15 UTC