**4. W3C MMIWG standards**

The companion working group, Multi-Modal Interaction Working Group (MMIWG), led by Deborah Dahl was attended by almost the same companies attending VBWG. The goal of MMIWG was to extend the scope of standardization beyond the voice or typed input to embrace a much larger set of modalities, such as touch, gesture, emotions, and haptics both as input and output devices for a system.

The major achievements of the W3C MMIWG were the following standards:

• Ink Markup Language, InkML [40], is designed to represent the input of handwriting by a stylus or a finger. In addition to representing traces, InkML offers a rich set of metadata that preserve the appearance of the original input (i.e., color, width, orientation, timing, etc.).


Another achievement of the W3C MMIWG was the definition of a multimodal architecture [46]. The multimodal architecture provides an event-based protocol for an interaction manager, possibly implemented in SCXML 1.0 [27], to coordinate an ensemble of modality components, each responsible for processing inputs or producing outputs in specific modalities. The protocol consists of a limited set of standard LifeCycle events—NewContext, Prepare, Start, Pause, Resume, Cancel, Done, ClearContext, Status, and Extension. The standard events include a set of standard fields, for example, fields to record the source and destination of the event, as well as a Data field, which can contain the results of processing an input.

A very detailed and up-to-date description of W3C multimodal standards is contained in [47].

As you see, there was close relationship between these two W3C working groups whose aim was to create a set of interoperable and complementary standards to expand capabilities of state-of-the-art applications.
