Summary of June, 2004 face to face meeting of the MMI Working Group

The W3C Multimodal Interaction (MMI) Working Group [1] held a face to
face meeting in Detroit, Michigan, June 10-11, 2004, hosted by EDS and
OnStar. There were 24 attendees from 21 organizations. This note
summarizes the results of the meeting.

The MMI meeting was colocated with a meeting of the Voice Browser
Working Group [2](see [3] for a summary of the Voice Browser
meeting). We took advantage of this to engage in several discussions
about the evolving Voice Browser V3 architecture and its relationship
to multimodal architectures. We also spent some time on a review of
the MMI use case document [4]. Because we've made considerable
progress on the MMI framework [5] and multimodal integration [6],
since the original use cases were developed, it was useful to revisit
the use cases in order to understand their implications for MMI
architectures.  We plan to publish an MMI architecture document which
will include the results of the updated use case discussion, as well
as a description of the MMI architectures. This document is targeted
for publication in 4Q 04.

Other ongoing group activities were reviewed, including:

1. EMMA (Extensible MultiModal Annotation)[7] for representing and
annotating user input. We are aiming for a publication of the next
working draft at the end of July. We anticipate that the next working
draft after that one will be a Last Call, currently planned for
December of 2004.

2. InkML (Ink Markup Language) for representing digital ink [8]. An
update to the Working Draft is planned for late July, with the Last
Call currently planned for December of 2004.

3. Work on making system and environment information available to
multimodal applications. Because the system and environment work is
closely related to Device Independence [9], the MMI group is working
closely with the Device Independence Working Group in this area. The
group is targeting July, 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, expected in 4Q 04. Some of the insights gained during this
study will also be considered for incorporation into the EMMA work.

5. An ongoing study of approaches to interaction managment. We plan
to publish a Note on the results of this study in 4Q 04.

IBM and V-Enable also presented demonstrations of some of their
multimodal efforts.

Many thanks to EDS and OnStar for providing excellent meeting
facilities and team-building activities.

The next face to face meeting will take place during the week of
September 20, 2004, in Hawthorne, New York, hosted by IBM.

References:

[1] Multimodal Interaction Working Group:
    http://www.w3.org/2002/mmi/
[2] Voice Browser: http://www.w3.org/Voice/
[3] Voice Browser face to face summary: 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-voice/2004AprJun/0079.html
[4] MMI Use Cases http://www.w3.org/TR/mmi-use-cases/
[5] MMI Framework http://www.w3.org/TR/mmi-framework/
[6] Multimodal Integration: http://www.w3.org/TR/modality-interface/
[7] EMMA: http://www.w3.org/TR/emma/
[8] InkML: http://www.w3.org/TR/InkML/
[9] Device Independence: http://www.w3.org/2001/di/

Best regards,

Debbie Dahl, MMI Working Group Chair

Received on Friday, 2 July 2004 06:56:03 UTC