XTech 2005: XML, the Web and beyond.
Although the W3C Multimodal Interaction (MMI) Activity has been running since 2002, it is still under the radar of the Web community at large. Nevertheless, the MMI Working Group has been working steadily, and now that two of its specifications are being published as last-call working draft, its work is becoming more visible.
Along with the Voice Browser and the Device Independence Working Groups, the MMI group is investigating what the browsers of the future, be them embedded on pocket-sized mobile phones, running on big desktop PCs connected to various input and output devices, or integrated with your car's navigation and entertainment system.
Standardisation work is especially important in this area as browser vendors are already deploying multimodal solutions, e.g. Speech Application Language Tags running in Internet Explorer, or XHTML+Voice running on Opera. Efforts to use already deployed standards on new environment are also visible: VoiceXML servers running on mobile phones, SMIL for multimedia messaging, etc.
This presentation will mostly be a survey of the work of the three Working Groups mentioned, especially outlining their dependencies, with each other as well as with other standardisation efforts.
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Max Froumentin
W3C/ERCIM
Max has been working for W3C since 2000. He has been the W3C contact for the Math, XSL, Multimodal Interaction and Voice Browser working group. He has participated in the writing of several specifications and has done many presentations on various W3C activities. He is also currently involved in a couple of EU projects related to the Semantic Web and Multimodal activities at W3C.