Peter J. Danielsen

The promise of a voice-enabled Web

Many computing professionals have heard of XML, and some use it to describe text, images and other data with rich structure. The author discusses an innovative use of XML, called VoiceXML, to support human-computer dialogs via spoken input and audio output. VoiceXML defines dialogs between humans and machines in terms of audio files to be played, text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition capabilities, and touch-tone input. The author reviews the existing architectures for World Wide Web and telephone services, describes how VoiceXML enables consolidation of service logic for Web and phone, and summarizes the features of the VoiceXML 1.0 specification. Implementation of VoiceXML clients and VoiceXML services has begun in many of the VoiceXML Forums member companies and will soon be available in the marketplace. The World Wide Web Voice Browser working group has adopted VoiceXML 1.0 as the basis for the dialog markup language that is part of its speech user interface framework.

Validation and Interactivity of Web API Documentation

Many Web APIs (by which we mean ones using HTTP as the application protocol) do not publish a machine-readable API description (in a language such as WADL or WSDL) but only provide human-readable documentation, usually in HTML. This documentation may be machine-generated, or it may be hand-edited in which case there is the possibility of errors being introduced into the API description. In this paper we present a Web Interface Language (WIfL) vocabulary for API documentation, which is intended to be embedded in HTML using RDFa annotations. We present the semantics of WIfL, including a formal presentation of inheritance and validation. We discuss our WIfL tools, which include a dynamically generated console for interacting with an APIs reference implementation, and a validator which can check an API for internal consistency.

User Interface Design in Semi-automated Ontology Construction

This paper describes the graphical user interface design and implementation of LexOnt, a semi-automatic ontology creation tool. LexOnt is built as a Protégé plugin and uses the Programmable Web directory as its corpus. Current semi-automatic ontology creation systems are domain specific and rely on already structured text. LexOnt, on the other hand, is built specifically for those who are not experts within a domain, but want to understand the domain on a high-level and create an ontology that describes it. Using well-known NLP algorithms, LexOnt generates a list of top terms and phrases from the Programmable Web corpus to enable users to find high-level features that distinguish one Programmable Web service category from another. To also aid non-experts in a domain, LexOnt relies on outside sources such as Wikipedia and Wordnet to help the user identify the important terms within a service category. We describe the details of LexOnts interactive interface that allows users to semi-automatically find top terms and phrases of a service domain and create ontology entities describing it with these features.

Semi-automated Ontology Creation for High-Level Service Classification

In this paper, we propose a LexOnt, a semi-automatic ontology creation tool for high-level service ontology. LexOnt uses the Programmable Web directory of services as its corpus of data along with Internet sources such as Wikipedia in order to generate common terms within a service domain and determine generic properties for classification. Currently, Programmable Web classifies services in a flat categorization where each service is manually classified within a single category. Search is limited to attributes that are not related to the semantics of the service, such as protocol or messaging type. When using an ontology for the service API descriptions, services can be automatically classified and queried for according to their attributes. Additionally, services can then be distributed in an ontology-based service discovery system such as GloServ so that semantic registration and querying of services becomes possible.

Media services in SIP networks

Media services have played an important role in the traditional time division multiplexing (TDM)-based telephone network. As the network migrates to an Internet Protocol (IP)-based environment, media services are also moving to new environments. This paper reviews the background of media services and examines current trends in the telecommunications and Internet industries to identify implications for the future of such services in IP networks, especially in Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based environments. One of the most exciting trends is the emergence and adoption of complementary modular standards that leverage the Internet to enable media services to be developed, deployed, and updated more rapidly than before in a network architecture that supports concepts we call provisioning on demand and scaling on demand. This paper discusses how these new standards facilitate these concepts and how the concepts can be applied to create a media server that requires no preprovisioned service-specific logic or service-specific resources (e.g., announcements and grammars). It also provides an overview of the Bell Labs media server prototype, which has been developed to support and explore this vision.