Platform for flexible integration of multimodal technologies into web application domain

Most users in either desktop or ubiquitous environments access Web applications from Web browser interfaces. Majority of standard Web applications are still based on GUIs and usually support user-machine interaction using traditional human-machine interfaces (e.g. mouse, keyboard). In order to make access to the Web content more natural and to improve user experience, advanced user interfaces, enabling additional modalities in human machine interaction, must be developed and provided. This paper presents a concept and proposes a multimodal web platform (MWP) used for flexible integration of advanced multimodal technologies into web applications. The multimodal web platform suggests a process of integration of web applications into multimodal framework, instead of traditional integration of multimodal interfaces into web application, and formation of platform independent multimodal interface. The proposed MWP platform was developed in order to provide multimodal interface for interactive kiosk setup and multimodal e-commerce application. The MWP platform is based on Apache Tomcat web server, Java Web technology as middleware environment and complex distributive infrastructure that takes care for providing multimodal services. Key-Words: multimodality, multimodal interfaces, Apache Tomcat, Java Web, multimodal web platform