summary of the Multimodal Interaction Working Group face to face meeting

The W3C Multimodal Interaction (MMI) Working Group [1] held a face to
face meeting in Hawthorne, New York, September 22-24, 2004, hosted by
IBM.  There were 33 attendees from 23 organizations. This note
summarizes the results of the meeting.

The MMI meeting was colocated with a meeting of the Voice Browser
Working Group [2]. We took advantage of this to hold a joint meeting
with the Voice Browser group about the evolving Voice Browser V3
architecture and its relationship to multimodal architectures.

The MMI meeting focused on MMI architectures and authoring
approaches. In the architectures area the main discussion topic was
the overall approach to events and communication among components. In
the area of authoring we reviewed several approaches, such as CSS,
markup and scripting, and began planning for an authoring
specification.

We are currently planning to publish the MMI architecture document in
March, 2005. We also plan to publish a Working Draft on authoring,
expected in June, 2005.

Other ongoing group activities were reviewed, including:

1. EMMA (Extensible MultiModal Annotation)[3] for representing and
annotating user input. A new Working Draft was published right before
the face to face, so during this meeting we focused on planning for
the Last Call Working Draft, which we expect to be in December of
2004.

2. InkML (Ink Markup Language) for representing digital ink [4]. We
approved publication of the most recent Working Draft, which was
published September 28. The next publication is expected to be the
Last Call Working Draft, and is currently planned for February, 2005.

3. System and Environment work for making system and environment
information available to multimodal applications [5]. Because the system
and environment work is closely related to Device Independence [6],
the MMI group is working closely with the Device Independence Working
Group in this area. This group published its first Working Draft in
July, and plans to publish a Last Call Working Draft in November.

4. Composite Input: that is, coordinated input from multiple
modalities, such as speech combined with a pointing gesture. Some of
the work we have been doing in this area has been incorporated into
the latest EMMA Working Draft (Section 3.2.12). We also anticipate
that the work on architectures and authoring will address issues of
handling composite input.

5. Interaction Management: We expect that the work we have been doing
in this area will be folded into the work on architectures and
authoring, rather than being published as a separate document.

V-Enable, Canon, and EDS also presented demonstrations of some of
their work in multimodality.

Thanks to IBM for hosting the meeting.  The next Multimodal
Interaction Working Group meeting will be held in Turin, Italy on
December 9-10, hosted by Loquendo.

best regards,

Debbie Dahl
MMI Working Group Chair

References:

[1] Multimodal Interaction Working Group:
    http://www.w3.org/2002/mmi/
[2] Voice Browser: http://www.w3.org/Voice/
[3] EMMA: http://www.w3.org/TR/emma/
[4] InkML: http://www.w3.org/TR/InkML/
[5] System and Environment: http://www.w3.org/TR/sysenv/
[6] Device Independence: http://www.w3.org/2001/di/

Received on Friday, 22 October 2004 00:15:53 UTC