Summary of the Multimodal Interaction Working Group meeting, February 27-28, 2006

The W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group [1] held its winter
face-to-face meeting in Mandelieu, France, February 27-28, 2006, in
conjunction with the W3C annual Technical Plenary meeting [2]. The group
reviewed an internal draft of the Multimodal Architecture, which includes a
more detailed set of life cycle events than was contained in the previous
draft. We expect to publish the next Working Draft within a few weeks. We
also discussed different authoring strategies that conform to the Multimodal
Architecture, for example, we reviewed examples of authoring multimodal
applications using both SCXML [3] and scripting as the Interaction Manager.
We also discussed strategies for developing tests for the upcoming EMMA
Implementation Report, which will demonstrate the implementability of EMMA's
features. 
We held joint meetings with the Voice Browser Working Group and the Compound
Documents Working Group, where we compared the MMI Architecture with the
Compound Documents framework. The primary difference between the approaches
is the encapsulation of modality components in the MMI Architecture vs. a
unified DOM across namespaces in the CDF approach. We also met with the
Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, where we discussed best practices
in design for multimodal mobile applications using voice. We intend to
publish our proposed best practices as a W3C Note. We also discussed
feedback we've had from developers who are creating multimodal applications,
and we plan to publish this feedback within a few weeks as a W3C Note.

Currently planned upcoming publications:

1. Multimodal Architecture, Working Draft
2. EMMA (Extensible Multimodal Annotation) Candidate Recommendation
3. InkML Last Call Working Draft
4. Multimodal User Interface Design Best Practices
5. Multimodal Developer Feedback 

Our next face-to-face meeting will be held in Atlanta on June 21-23, hosted
by Vocalocity.

best regards,

Debbie Dahl
W3C Multimodal Interaction Working Group Chair

[1] Multimodal Interaction Working Group: http://www.w3.org/2002/mmi/
[2] W3C Technical Plenary: http://www.w3.org/2005/12/allgroupoverview.html
[3] SCXML: http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-scxml-20060124/
[4] Voice Browser Working Group: http://www.w3.org/Voice/
[5] Compound Document Formats Working Group: http://www.w3.org/2004/CDF/
[6] Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group:
http://www.w3.org/2005/MWI/BPWG/

Received on Monday, 20 March 2006 19:00:05 UTC