A Multimodal Interface for the Discovery and Invocation of Web Services

Abstract

The World Wide Web has been enhanced with many types of online services such as banking access, e-commerce, e-health, e-learning, etc. This variety of services, distributed around the world, can be accessed from any place at anytime. However, in some situations a user may face difficulties in the use of the traditional mouse and keyboard input devices to search and access services through the Web. In this paper we propose the use of multimodal interfaces for the discovery and invocation of Web Services. Our approach, called Multimodal Interface for Discovery and Invocation of Web Services (MIDIWS), transforms users requests made in XHTML + VoiceXML into requests specified as SOAP messages. These requests are sent to a UDDI repository which returns a service or a set of services also by means of SOAP messages. These messages are transformed back into XHTML + VoiceXML and, then, presented to the user.