Summary of the December Multimodal Interaction Working Group face to face meeting

Here's a summary of the most recent face to face meeting of
the W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group.

Summary of the W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group and 
Ink Subgroup Face to Face meetings 

December 9-11 (main meeting) 12-13 (ink subgroup meeting)
Washington DC, USA
hosted by Cisco

This was the fourth face to face meeting of the Multimodal 
Interaction Working Group. There were 33 attendees from 23 organizations. 
This meeting also included a smaller follow-on meeting of the subgroup of 
the MMI group which is working on an ink specification.

There were 3 significant accomplishments resulting from these meetings.

1. Approval of three requirements documents for publication:
   a) the core requirements for Multimodal Interaction
   b) requirements for EMMA (Extensible MultiModal Annotation)
   c) requirement for ink interaction (provisionally approved 
   pending a one-week final review period (which has since expired)).

Official publication of the three requirements documents is expected 
in mid-January.

2. Preliminary work on and planning for studies covering:
   a)an object oriented analysis of input/output and ancillary
   components for MMI.
   b)approaches to interaction management in a multimodal environment.

The events work which we are currently engaged in will be folded into 
these two studies as appropriate. The results of these two activities 
are expected to form the core of the MMI specification which we expect 
to publish as a W3C Working Draft in June, 2003. These plans are also 
described on the Working Group home page [1].

3. In the ink subgroup meeting an analysis was done comparing the ink
   requirements against features of the InkXML specification
   (described on the MMI home page [1]). This provides a road map for
   the work ahead to build the specification.

Other presentations:

1. Gerald McCobb (IBM), Stephen Potter (Microsoft), and Tsuneo Nitta
   (Toyahashi University of Technology) presented stimulating analyses of
   how several different approaches (X+V, SALT and XISL) would handle
   specific issues in multimodal interaction -- simultaneous input from
   multiple modalities and the interface to the back end application.

2. Eric Burger (Snowshore Networks) gave a presentation on the SpeechSC 
   activities in the IETF (See [2] for more information on SpeechSC.)
   
3. Deborah Dahl gave a presentation on the activities of the ISLE-NIMM
   project (International Standards for Language Engineering-Natural
   Interaction and Multimodality) (See [3] and [4] for more information on 
   ISLE-NIMM.)

The next face to face meeting will be March 6-7, 2003 in conjunction 
with the annual W3C Technical Plenary meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
hosted by the W3C.


[1]http://www.w3.org/2002/mmi/ 
[2]http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/speechsc-charter.html
[3]http://www.ilc.pi.cnr.it/EAGLES96/isle/ISLE_Home_Page.htm
[4]http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/sb/isle.html

Deborah Dahl, Conversational Technologies, MMI Working Group Chair

Received on Friday, 3 January 2003 08:36:37 UTC