and

Call for participation

W3C/WAP Workshop on the Multimodal Web

The convergence of W3C and WAP standards, and the emerging importance of speech recognition and synthesis for the Mobile Web

Hong Kong, 5-6 September 2000

Program Committee: Dave Raggett (W3C/HP), Alastair Angwin (WAP Forum/IBM), Jim Larson (Intel), Daniel Dardailler (W3C), Andrew Scott (Telstra), Johan Hjelm (W3C/Ericsson), Hidetaka Ohto (W3C/Panasonic)

Organized under the auspices of the W3C and WAP Forum Coordination Group (WWCG)

Workshop Goals and Scope

The Web is undergoing dramatic change with the promise of faster mobile communications and richer means of interaction. This workshop will examine the trends and bring together people involved in the disparate areas relevant to the convergence of the Mobile Web and Interactive Voice Response systems.

The workshop will seek to discuss questions such as:

What are the opportunities for convergence between W3C and WAP standards as we move forwards to third generation mobile networks?
What can we learn from WML and VoiceXML? Is a common dialog modeling language needed?
What architectures will be appropriate for multimodal systems where users can interact via a mixture of speech (recognition and synthesis), audio, displays, keypads and pointing devices (point and speak). How will these address accessibility concerns?
What is the relationship between dialog modelling and synchronized multimedia presentations (SMIL)? What opportunities do mobile systems offer for scalable vector graphics, animation and streaming media?
What approaches make sense for application state management? How does this relate to other Web applications such as VoiceXML and XForms?"
What is the relationship between the browser and the application? How does this relate to user preferences? Is there a need for standardization to avoid problems with porting applications developed for one vendor's phones to another's?
The display capabilities are expected to vary significantly. What kinds of changes (if any) may be appropriate in order for W3C's Cascading Style Sheets language to meet the challenge? Is there a role for simple constraint-based layout?
What is needed to ensure that applications are accessible to people with disabilities, and how can this be facilitated via Web content guidelines?

Expected audience

We expect several groups will be interested in the workshop:

Experts in mobile systems, who wish to explore the challenges presented by the convergence of Mobile and Interactive Voice Response systems.
Experts in Interactive Voice Response systems with an interest in how these can exploit mobility and the opportunities for multimodal systems.
Experts in synchronized multimedia presentations, interested in how these can be supported in mobile applications
Experts in style sheet languages who are interested in the issues arising from an emerging new class of mobile devices.
Experts in WAI guidelines and related tools (WAI Evaluation and Repair groups), including expert users with disabilities.
WAP engineers working on transformation of generic Web content to WAP devices (e.g WML).

Registration and rules for participation

There will be a limit of 50 participants.
The workshop is an open event; however, space is limited and preference will be given to (1) members of W3C and WAP Forum working groups and (2) experts in the field of device-independent authoring techniques.
The cost of the workshop will be borne by the arranging organizations. There will be no participation fee.
The number of participants per organization is initially limited to one.
Position papers are required to participate at this workshop. Each organisation wishing to participate should submit a position paper explaining their interest in the workshop no later than three weeks before the workshop. See further the Position Papers section of this document.
To attend the workshop, you must register by filling out the registration form. Registration is required, even for invited speakers, experts and W3C staff!
Persons who are not registered in advance will not be admitted to the workshop.

Position Papers

Position papers are a springboard for discussion at the workshop and we expect that the dialog should go well beyond what is in the position papers. You should submit one to the Program Committee prior to registering.

A position paper is usually short, around 1 to 4 pages (there is a maximum of five pages, or 27000 characters) and summarizes:

What are the needs of your company/organization that you would like to have addressed in the Workshop.
What are your general expectations on the final outputs of the workshop
Your potential contributions to the discussion, related ideas, and suggested solutions. In the case of a well-defined technical contribution, this may be accompanied to the position paper as a separate paper, that may exceed the 5 pages limit.

Position papers will be published on the public Web pages of the workshop, so position papers and slides of presentations must be available for public dissemination. Submitting a position paper comprises a default recognition of these terms for publication.

All participants will be asked to briefly introduce their interest statement orally during the workshop.

The Programme Committee will ask the authors of particularly salient position papers to explicitly present their position at the workshop to foster discussion. In this case, the authors are also required to make the slides of the presentation available on the workshop Web site.

It is required that every member or organization represented at the workshop submit a position paper. Position papers should be submitted via email to the Workshop Program Committee prior to registering. Allowed formats are HTML and ASCII. Papers in other formats will be returned, with a request for correct formatting. Good examples of position papers can be seen in the QL'98 workshop.

Workshop organization

The workshop will last for two days. The first day will consist of presentations setting out the technology and business directions. The second day will focus on what steps are needed to take the ideas further in the W3C and the WAP Forum.

Hotel Details

The meeting will take place in Island Shangri-La, Hong Kong. All particants must fill out a printed copy of the room reservation form and FAX it back to the hotel on +852 2820 8517

About the Programme Committee

Dave Raggett is a W3C Fellow on assignment from Hewlett Packard. He is the W3C activity lead for work on HTML, XForms, Voice Browsers and Math. Dave has been closely involved in Web standards since 1992, and is an author of several books on HTML as well as maintaining W3C's open source tool for repairing HTML (HTML Tidy).

Alastair Angwin chairs the WAP Forum's Application Environment committee, working on assignment from IBM.

Daniel Dardailler joined the W3C team in July 1996 and is the Technical Manager of W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative. He is also the site manager of the W3C INRIA-Sophia Antipolis team and site.

Jim Larson chairs the W3C Voice Browser working group which is developing markup languages for speech dialog, grammar, text to speech, natural language semantics, multimodal dialogs, and reusable dialog modules. Jim also manages Advanced Huan I/O at Intel Architecture Labs, and teaches courses in building speech applications at Oregon Graduate Institute and Portland State University.

Andrew Scott leads the WML Generic Content Authoring Guidelines (GCAG) effort within the WAP Forum's Developer Group (WDG). He is based at Telstra's Research Labs, and has worked on WAP-related activities since 1997. In addition to WAP, he has worked on transcoding generic web content, voice browsers, and with the usability team at Telstra.

Johan Hjelm is a W3C Fellow working on assignment from Ericsson. Johan chairs the W3C's CC/PP working group, which is trying to define a universal profile mechanism for information appliances and contextual information.

Hidetaka Ohto is a W3C Fellow working on assignment from Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.,Ltd(a.k.a Panasonic) in Osaka. He graduated from the University of Osaka in Japan with his master degrees of Computer Science in 1989. His area of interests is the adaptation of Web technologies for home appliances such as mobile terminals and TV sets.