Achieving Interoperability of Pen Computing with Heterogeneous Devices and Digital Ink Formats

Pen-based computing has and continues to become accepted and increasingly used. Hardware and software vendors have typically stored and represented digital ink using proprietary or restrictive ink formats, and have provided software development toolkits to access or manipulate ink for user development on their devices. The variety of digital ink formats and device-dependent software toolkits has limited the ink exchange and application among heterogeneous devices. Our objective is to explore the interoperability of pen computing among heterogeneous devices and digital ink formats. Our investigation has two aspects: digital ink formats and pen computing application programming interfaces (APIs). We consider three ink formats: UNIPEN, Jot and InkML, and two ink APIs: the IBM CrossPad API and the Microsoft Tablet PC API. Our objectives are twofold: (1) to accomplish conversions among UNIPEN, Jot and InkML; (2) and to develop a common abstract API for the CrossPad and the Tablet PC. In this thesis, the issues in conversion among three ink formats are discussed, and the conversion between UNIPEN and Jot is implemented. We also identify the incompatibilities between the CrossPad API and the Tablet PC API. The design of an abstract API is described, and a partial implementation is complete.