nfoWorks: Pursuing Harmony

*nfoWorks*	*Pursuing Harmony* *tools for document interoperability*	privacy attribution
This is the web diary for nfoWorks and realization of the Harmony Principles. Pursuing Harmony tracks nfoWorks research, analysis, specification, and implementation of tools for document interoperability. There is commentary on related activities that address conformance, interoperability, and harmonization of document formats. Blog Feed Recent Items Republishing before Silence The Real Challenge of Achieving and Sustaining Int... Let’s Try This for a While Hooptedoodle: Blog Aversion and Standards Ignoranc... ODF Implementation-Support Toolkits and Libraries Adding Pursuing Harmony to Technorati Office Shots for Confirmed ODF Interchange Fidelit... ODF Interoperability at The Hague ODF and IPR/Licensing Concerns Open Government Data: Simple Principles The nfoCentrale Blog Conclave Millennia Antica: The Kiln Sitter's Diary nfoWorks: Pursuing Harmony Numbering Peano Orcmid's Lair Orcmid's Live Hideout Prof. von Clueless in the Blunder Dome Spanner Wingnut's Muddleware Lab (experimental) nfoCentrale Associated Sites DMA: The Document Management Alliance DMware: Document Management Interoperability Exchange Millennia Antica Pottery The Miser Project nfoCentrale: the Anchor Site nfoWare: Information Processing Technology nfoWorks: Tools for Document Interoperability NuovoDoc: Design for Document System Interoperability ODMA Interoperability Exchange Orcmid's Lair TROST: Open-System Trustworthiness	2008-10-30 Cover Pages: W3C Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces Technorati Tags: Cover Pages, W3C, multimodal architecture, MMI, multimodal interfaces, document behavior, document content, interoperability [update 2008-11-06 I don’t know how I failed to see that the very first sentence didn’t carry the sense I intended for it.] A current weakness in the open-document standards arena is the poorly-specified and tacit coupling of format provisions to behavior in various document processing contexts (creation, viewing, editing/manipulation, and various “final-form” renderings and, these days, interactive performance governed by the document, whether slide-show or something more elaborate). We’ll get to that some day, and the ways that such aspects are layered into specifications and their allowance for application innovation and conformance novelty remain to be discovered. This Cover Pages Daily Newslink item from 2008-10-21 leads to an account of the W3C Technical Report on Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces Fifth Working Draft. I’m putting down an *nfoWorks* marker because of these intriguing passages in the Newslink: “The main difference from the previous draft is the addition of the rules and guidelines which will allow modality experts to describe the features, capabilities and APIs for specific modality components in sufficient detail so that the components will be interoperable in implementations of the Multimodal Architecture. … The specification describes a loosely coupled architecture for multimodal user interfaces, which allows for co-resident and distributed implementations, and focuses on the role of markup and scripting, and the use of well defined interfaces between its constituents.” I am hesitant about the following: “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 … At runtime, the MMI architecture features loosely coupled software constituents that may be either co-resident on a device or distributed across a network. In keeping with the loosely-coupled nature of the architecture, the constituents do not share context and communicate only by exchanging events.” There are some wise words about keeping straight the different design-time and run-time considerations. I suspect that this is not going to bear directly on realization of the Harmony Principles, but it might provide useful conceptual underpinnings for an account of the behavioral aspects that are at least as important in document-mediated interoperability as the standard document format. Labels: architecture, behavior, conceptualization, interoperability ¶ posted by orcmid at 10/30/2008 11:32:00 AM from: