Multimodal Interaction Working Group face to face meeting, June 18-20, 2007

Summary of the W3C Multimodal Interaction F2F meeting June 18-20, 2007

Thanks to H-care for hosting the MMI working group face-to-face 
meeting June 18-20, 2007 at Roncade in the beautiful Veneto region of 
Italy, and for the activity in Venice on Wednesday afternoon and 
evening.  Thanks also for an informative and interesting visit to H-care 
and related businesses on Thursday afternoon.

Here is a summary of our discussions.

Multimodal Architecture:[1] The Multimodal Architecture describes a
loosely coupled architecture for multimodal user interfaces, which
allows for co-resident and distributed implementations, and focuses on
the role of markup and scripting, and the use of well defined
interfaces between its constituents. We reviewed the current version
of the MMI Architecture and planned for the next version. The next
Working Draft will include a definition of the format schema for life
cycle events and more details on protocols. We expect the next Working
Draft to be published in October.

Multimodal Authoring: We are working on developing authoring examples
developed by WG members using SCXML, EMMA, and XHTML as well as higher
level issues such as focus synchronization. We plan to have a draft
ready to review at the next face to face meeting in November. 
This is not expected to be a Recommendation track document but 
a Working Group Note, or we may fold this into an informative 
appendix of the Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces specification.

EMMA:[2] EMMA is an XML markup language for containing and annotating
the interpretation of user input. We reviewed comments from the second
Last Call Working Draft of EMMA and finalized our responses. Since the
face to face we have sent responses to the commenters and have
received agreement with our responses from nearly all the
commenters. We are now targeting August 15 for Candidate
Recommendation and November 15 for Proposed Recommendation.

InkML:[3] The Ink Markup Language serves as the data format for
representing ink entered with an electronic pen or stylus. We would
like to get more participants involved in this work by recruiting
additional members from companies in the ink marketplace, perhaps by
holding a workshop. We will also start planning work on defining an
ink modality.

Joint MMI and Voice Browser Meeting: We had a joint meeting with the
Voice Browser Working group where we heard presentations from several
outside speakers. Umberto Basso, CEO of H-care, presented their Human
Digital Assistant
technology which includes 3D real-time rendering and text-to-speech. Prof.
Piero Cosi discussed his work in 3D Facial
Animation and Prof. Giuseppe Riccardi discussed his work in third
generation conversational interfaces.

Our next Face to Face will be held in Boston in conjunction
with the W3C Technical Plenary meeting, Nov 5-9, 2007. The Multimodal
Interaction F2F meeting will be held on Thursday and Friday of that
week, with a joint meeting with the Voice Browser WG on Tuesday 
afternoon.

Best regards,

Debbie Dahl, MMIWG Chair

[1] Architecture: http://www.w3.org/TR/mmi-arch/
[2] EMMA: http://www.w3.org/TR/emma/
[3] InkML: http://www.w3.org/TR/InkML/

Received on Wednesday, 1 August 2007 14:26:18 UTC