Summary of March 2004 Multimodal Interaction Working Group Face to Face Meeting

The W3C Multimodal Interaction (MMI) Working Group [1] held a face to
face meeting in Cannes, France, March 1-2, 2004, in conjunction with
the W3C Annual Technical Plenary meeting [2].  There were 45 attendees
from 35 organizations. This note summarizes the results of the
meeting.

Because many other W3C Working Groups were meeting at the same time,
The Working Group took the opportunity to discuss cross working group
issues in several sessions, including a joint meeting with the Device
Independence (DI) Working Group [3]. The SVG [4] and HTML [5] working
groups also joined us a session in which we reviewed our work on
integrating modality components into host environments. We expect to
publish this work as a Note in May, 2004.  We also participated in a
joint meeting on component extensions with the SVG, DI, and Web
Accessibility Initiative Protocols and Formats (WAI PF) [6] groups.
(see [7] for more information on component extensions.)

Other ongoing group activities were reviewed, including:

1. EMMA (Extensible MultiModal Annotation)[8] for representing and
annotating user input. We are planning another Working Draft, but we
are still working on the schedule.

2. InkML (Ink Markup Language) for representing digital ink [9]. An
update to the Working Draft is planned for May, 2004.

3. Work on making system and environment information available to
multimodal applications. Because the system and environment work is
closely related to DI, the MMI group is working closely with the DI
group in this area. The group is targeting June, 2004 for a Working
Draft based on this work.

4. Approaches to handling composite input; that is, coordinated input
from multiple modalities, such as speech combined with a pointing
gesture. The group is planning to publish a Note on the results of the
study. Some of the insights gained during this study will be
considered for incorporation into the EMMA work.

5. An ongoing study of approaches to interaction managment, which was
initiated at our previous face to face meeting in October of 2003.

ATT, Access, and Openstream also presented demonstrations of some of
their internal multimodal applications.

In addition to the face to face meeting, MMI Working Group members
also participated in a session during the Plenary Day Meeting [10] on
the topic of "Can I Really Get Good Web Access Without Carrying a PC
and a Big Screen?", highlighting multimodal interaction as one answer
to that question. The Voice Browser Working Group [11] and the Device
Independence Working Group also participated in this session.

The next face to face meeting will take place June 10-11, 2004, in
Detroit, Michigan.

References:

[1] Multimodal Interaction Working Group:
    http://www.w3.org/2002/mmi/
[2] 2004 W3C Technical Plenary meeting:
    http://www.w3.org/2003/08/allgroupoverview
[3] Device Independence: http://www.w3.org/2001/di/
[4] Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG):
    http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
[5] HTML http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/:
[6] WAI PF group: http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/
[7] Component Extensions requirements:
    http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/NOTE-CX-20011211
[8] EMMA: http://www.w3.org/TR/emma/
[9] InkML: http://www.w3.org/TR/InkML/
[10] Technical Plenary Agenda:
    http://www.w3.org/2004/03/TechPlenAgenda.html
[11] Voice Browser: http://www.w3.org/Voice/


Best regards,

Debbie Dahl, MMI Working Group Chair

Received on Monday, 12 April 2004 09:01:32 UTC