Summary of the October 20-21 Multimodal Interaction Working Group Face to Face Meeting

The Multimodal Interaction Working Group held a face-to-face meeting
in Mandelieu, France, October 20-21, 2008.  This meeting was held in
connection with the W3C Technical Plenary /Advisory Committee Meetings
(TPAC) [1].  This note summarizes topics discussed during the meeting.

1. Architecture: WG members Deutsche Telekom and Openstream presented
demos of their applications based on the MMI Architecture and
Interfaces specification [2] illustrating various modality components
(MC's) and interaction managers (IM's) based on HTML, Flash, SCXML,
CCXML and VoiceXML. Based on the demos, we discussed various options
for ensuring interoperability and reusabilty of interaction managers
through some level of abstraction across the IM/MC interface. We are
exploring the idea of "profiles", that is, refinements of the abstract
MMI Architecture which specify various details that are left undefined
in the Architecture, including transport protocols, the contents of
"data" fields and "extensionNotification" events.

2. Modality Components: In order to test and expand on the ideas
described in the MMI Architecture on defining MC's, we prepared draft
MC definitions of several MC's, including ink capture and playback
using InkML [3], geolocation, speech recognition based on MRCP [4],
and GUI. These will be included in future Working Drafts of the MMI
Architecture specification.

3. Emotion: We held discussions with members of the Emotion Markup
Language XG [5] concerning the possibility of their joining our WG
next year.  It seems that there is some useful synergy between our
work. For example, future versions of EMMA [6] could potentially
include emotion markup.

4. SVG: We had a joint meeting with representatives of the SVG [7]
working group and described the process of defining MC's. The SVG
representatives agreed to define an SVG MC using our rules and
guidelines. This would enable SVG to be used with other modalities
such as voice, haptics, or ink as part of a multimodal application.

5. EMMA: There are now 11 implementation reports on EMMA and we will
be moving forward to transition EMMA to the status of a W3C Proposed
Recommendation. The implementation reports are available on this list
(www-multimodal@w3.org).

6. InkML: Several InkML demos were presented. The University of
Western Ontario presented a demo of an InkML add-on to Skype. The demo
supports a shared, InkML-based whiteboard which captures both voice
and ink and then creates a file which can be made available to other
colleagues. Microsoft demonstrated their InkML implementation, which
is also integrated with EMMA. An open source demo of InkML editing and
display in Firefox developed by HP [8] was presented later in the
week, after the meeting.

7. Backplane XG: We held a discussion with representatives of the
Backplane XG [9] on possible relationships between their work and MMI.

8. Technical Plenary Day demos: We also organized and participated in
a session during the Plenary Day meeting on October 22 [10].
Openstream, IBM and BitFlash presented demonstrations of multimodal
interaction, voice browsing, and the use of State Chart XML as a
connector.

Since our charter expires at the end of January, 2009, we have decided
to wait until rechartering to schedule our next face to face meeting.

best regards,

Debbie Dahl
MMI Working Group Chair

References:
[1] Technical Plenary: http://www.w3.org/2008/10/TPAC/
[2] MMI Architecture and Interfaces: http://www.w3.org/TR/mmi-arch/
[3] InkML: http://www.w3.org/TR/InkML/
[4] MRCP (Media Resources Control Protocol):
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-speechsc-mrcpv2-16
[5] Emotion Markup Language Incubator Group:
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/emotion/
[6] EMMA: http://www.w3.org/TR/emma/
[7] SVG: http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
[8] InkML Toolkit: http://sourceforge.net/projects/inkmltk/
[9] Backplane XG: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/app-backplane/
[10] Plenary Day Demos: http://www.w3.org/2008/10/TPAC/TPDay-Agenda.html

Received on Monday, 15 December 2008 14:49:48 UTC