W3C Call

Position papers are due on 05-October-2007 for the Workshop on W3C's
Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces, to be on 16-17 November 2007
in Fujisawa, Japan, hosted by W3C/Keio. Attendees will discuss the
support and integration of user interface components such as speech,
GUI and handwriting recognition from multiple vendors, to help the
Multimodal Interaction Working Group make the Multimodal Architecture
and Interfaces specification more useful in current and emerging
markets. The W3C Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces (MMI
Architecture) specification is designed to provide a general and
flexible framework providing interoperability among modality-specific
components from different vendors - for example, speech recognition
from one vendor and handwriting recognition from another. This
framework places very few restrictions on the individual components
or on their interactions with each other, but instead focuses on
providing a general means for allowing them to communicate with each
other, plus basic infrastructure for application control and platform
services. Workshop participants will seek to identify and prioritize
requirements for changes, extensions and additions to the MMI
Architecture to better support speech, GUI, Ink, and other Modality
Components. Position papers will be the basis for the discussion at
the workshop. Papers should explain the participant's interest in
the workshop, explain their position and include concrete examples
of their suggestions. Possible topics include, but are not limited
to the following: (1) Requirements for extensions to the MMI
Architecture to improve the support of speech, GUI and Ink interfaces
on portable handheld multimodal devices. (2) Extensions to the InkML
needed to work within a multimodal environment. (3) How to process
early and late information fusion. (4) How to dinamically select
appropriate modalities. (5) Plans to support multimodal applications
and what standards are needed. (6) What kind of other W3C specification
should be considered to provide user interface skins for whichever
modes of interaction selected. (7) Support for effective user
interfaces for various modes of interaction, in terms of contextual
prompts, constrained text input, and declarative event handlers,
taking account of uncertainties in user input. (8) Re-use of existing
markup languages for prompts and constraints on user input. (9) Use
of scripts to enable the customization of the user interface based
upon previous user input. W3C membership is not required to
participate in this workshop.