Software Engineering for Multimodal Interactive Applications: The MEMFIS Approach

The diversification of end user devices and the mastering of digital media lead to a new challenge for interactive soft­ware: support for several, interchangeable interaction modaZities. Since prinicples known from, e.g., platform-inde­pendent graphical UI toolkits cannot be extended towards modality independence, a new approach is proposed: the modality abstracting user inteiface toolkit MAUl. Further­more, known software engineering methodologies and design methods are insufficient in the context discussed since they do not sufficiently reflect the much increased importance of human interaction, letalone yield designs that would faci­Zitate multiple interchangeable modalities. The paper there­fore presents the modeling techniques SAM and TOM, and the embracing software engineering methodology MEMFIS which complement the MAUl toolkit