MWeb - Multimodal Web Interaction

This is the home page of the MWeb project, financed by the European Commission's IST Programme (unit INFSO-E1: Interfaces).

MWeb supports the development and adoption of industry standards ("W3C Recommendations") enabling multimodal Web access using mobile devices. MWeb includes European outreach activities on first-generation W3C multimodal Recommendations as well as support required for developing a second generation of specifications with significant European participation.

The project started on January 1st 2004, and ended on 31 December 2005.

Latest News

31 Dec 05: The MWeb project has finished succesfully

15 Nov. 05: MWI Sponsors to share their vision of the Mobile Web at the "The Web On the Move" event at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), 195 Piccadilly, London, UK.

9 November 2005: Philipp Hoschka participates at a panel entitled "Too Many Technologies? Too Many Standards?" at the "Mobile Application Platforms and OSS" on Wednesday, 9 November 2005, in Vienna, Austria.

25 May 2005: Max Froumentin presents at XTech'05 on The Multimodal Web, in Amsterdam, Netherlands

11 May 2005 - W3C Launches "Mobile Web Initiative" - Read the press release and the sponsor founders testimonials

15 April 2005 - Online registration is open for the MWeb seminar to be held in Toulouse on 21 June 05. This W3C seminar will be focused on "Multimodal Web Applications for Embedded Systems".

2 April 2005 - The Spanish version of the Multimodal Web and Mobile Web brochures are available. See in the Brochures page.

25 March 2005 - Launch of the MWeb public mailing list. Please subscribe!

21 March 2005 - Max Froumentin gives a lecture at Laboratoire Trigone of University of Lille: "The W3C and its Multimodal Interaction Activity"

Project Summary

The project is led by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which was founded by the Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. W3C has been active in the area of multimodal Web access for several years. Very likely, multimodal Web access will be the first widespread practical use of multimodal technology, and will have a similar impact on the adoption multimodal technology as the original Web had on the adoption of Internet technology.

Key objectives of the IST programme are reinforcing European strengths, and to overcome weaknesses in areas which are critical for European competitiveness. Multimodal Web access from mobile devices is a key opportunity for Europe to use one of its strengths (mobile technology) to overcome one of its weaknesses (Web technology) in order to increase overall competitiveness. Moreover, cooperation with standards bodies will be a contractual requirement in FP6 projects.

The MWeb outreach activities increase awareness and visibility of W3C's multimodal specifications within Europe. This is required since the first generation specifications have been developed with a limited level of European participation. Moreover, W3C's work on multimodal technology does not have the visibility of some other areas of W3C's more recent work (e.g. semantic Web, Web services).

The MWeb technical activities provide European research and industry with competent partners within the W3C that will help to raise the level of European participation in W3C's multimodal work to a level that is required to realize the potential increase in European strengths that lies in the convergence of Web and mobile technologies.

Project Objectives

The MWeb Project has the following key objectives:

Increase the awareness of forthcoming first generation W3C multimodal Recommendations within European research and industry
Raise the level of participation of European research and industry in W3C's second generation multimodal specifications.
Support the strategic objectives in IST by ensuring that European research and industry will have competent dialogue partners within the European W3C team during the course of FP6.
Establish links with projects funded by the Interface Technologies strategic objective which may have specific requirements to address. This will be initiated by inviting representatives of such projects to an early workshop funded by MWeb. At this workshop, the invited projects should present their requirements towards standardisation, present potential input to standardisation their projects could provide, and give feedback on existing W3C solutions.

Partners

The European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) aims to foster collaborative work within the European research community and to increase co-operation with European industry. Leading research institutes from eighteen European countries are members of ERCIM.

Working Groups

MWeb supports several W3C Working Groups that are working on technologies that increase the Web's device-independence and add new, multimodal interaction mechanisms to the Web.

Device Independence Working Group (home page, activity description)
Multimodal Interaction Working Group (home page, activity description)
Voice Browser Working Group (home page, activity description)

Those Working Groups will deliver their first results as W3C Recommendations (equivalent to Web standards in W3C). These documents include speech-related markup languages (VoiceXML 2.0, Speech Grammar Markup Language, Speech Synthesis Markup Language), a markup language for electronic ink (InkXML), specifications related to integrating modalities (multimodal framework, multimodal markup languages) and specifications increasing the device-independence of the Web (CC/PP, device-independent interaction markup).

The MWeb project is financed by the European Commission's IST Programme (unit INFSO-E1: Interfaces).

Marie-Claire Forgue (mcf@w3.org)
Last revised: $Date: 2006/08/09 10:21:28 $

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