Questions regarding MMI

Hello,

My name is Wolfgang Rabl and i am a master student at the university of 
Klagenfurt.
For my master thesis i have to implement a smarthome prototype where 
devices within the home can be controlled by a pc or a smartphone and 
through different input modalities.

During my research i found the W3C MMI framework and i think it looks 
very promising, but i have a few questions regarding your draft.

I am not sure how to handle the startup phase when there are no 
devices/modalities connected with the runtime framework. So how should 
one modality component (for Example a GUI on a PDA) connect itself? As i 
could see in your draft this may occur by using the NewContextRequest 
Event? Now a new context should be created using a SCXML that represents 
the application, but who provides this file? In 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-mmi-arch-20080414 D.1 it looks like the 
file that initializes the interaction manager is provided within the 
source parameter of the NewContextRequest event. But is it correct that 
the Modality component delivers the interaction model information?

I am not quite sure about the information contained within these SCXML 
document, during my research i found some information that there should 
be a distinction between the controlling of modality components and the 
control of the application flow, is this right? so there is a single 
SCXML definition for the coordination of the modality components and 
further SCXML documents for the control of the diferent running 
applications/contexts? Or should one File contain all the information?

During the execution of the SCXML document new modalities get started by 
using startRequest events. But how does the interaction manager know 
something about other connected modality components? So far only the 
first modality component (the PDA GUI) communicated with the interaction 
manager. Is there a further step at the beginning where all the modality 
components register themself (login?) Should this also be handled by the 
interaction manager?

So if the components are up and running, how does a new modality 
component connect itself to them same context?  Maybe the same user that 
belongs to the PDA wants to start a second GUI or some other modality on 
a PC. Is this also the purpose of the newContextRequest event? As i read 
the specification the new component would end up getting a new context 
and would not connect to the one allready running?

User input gets represented as EMMA documents. So if the user wants to 
change something within the application his input gets converted into 
EMMA representation and is passed over to the application. But what 
happens if there are some changes in the application? how is this 
information transportet to the modality components? As far is i can see 
EMMA is only for user input and not for application output.

I would really like to implement my prototype using your MM Architecture 
so i would appreciate any help you could offer me.

Thanks and best regards,
Wolfgang Rabl

Received on Friday, 9 May 2008 10:56:21 UTC