Fusion Engines and Melting Pots

Emerging multi-modal technology relies on innovative techniques for managing data, both at the user interface level, and at the internal application level. To assess design alternatives for this class of system, it is desirable to have models that focus attention on the critical features of these systems. Formal methods of software specification are known to provide this abstractive power in many contexts. This paper shows that an established specification technique can be used profitably to model, assess and improve the design of a generic kernel for multimodal systems.