About InkML definition... and Unipen

Hello all!

   We are at the very beginnig of an on-line handwriting recognition
project and looking for a standard data format for our handwriting
acquisitions. Unipen format seems to be a standard some years ago,
but the documentation file we have found it is not completely clear.
Browsing Unipen web site, we have found references to UPX as an
improvement over Unipen and InkML, but, again, we have not found
good UPX documentation. However, the reference to InkML seems very
promising and W3C support guarantees a complete documentation, so
I have just given a first look at the "Third Working Draft of InkML"
and have some questions and comments:

* Is W3C going to support UPX as it does with InkML? Will InkML
   evolve, instead, in order to incorporate more Unipen-like stuff?

* How should .HIERARCHY and .SEGMENT be translated to InkML format?
   And what about acquisition and writer details? Are <desc> and
   <metadata> appropriate for such purposes? They seem too generic
   for annotating multilevel handwriting segmentation in characters,
   words, sentences...

* Moreover, I have found some difficulties in InkML draft, maybe
   just errata:

   -I do not know if Y coordinate should grow upwards, downwards
    or this issue is acquisition dependent. It grows downwards in
    Figure 1, but Figures 2 and 3 show the Y axis pointing upwards.

   -Document says "The origin of the Azimuth is at the Y-axis" and
    "Azimuth increases anticlockwise up to 360 degrees", but
    Figures 2 and 3 (again) seem to illustrate that A increases
    clockwise.

   -In section 3.2.1, I find "The number of regularValue tokens
    appearing within a trace must match the number of regular
    channels specified in the <traceFormat>". Unless I am
    misunderstanding the sentence, it should be "within a regularPart"
    instead of "within a trace", shouldn't it?

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

                                  Federico Prat
                                  Valencia (SPAIN)

PS: This is my first contact with XML, so some degree of
     misunderstanding is expected... Sorry in advance for
     this.

Received on Thursday, 27 July 2006 12:24:55 UTC