The newly introduced Universal Ink Model is a data model describing ink related data structures and meta-data concept to describe the semantic content of ink.

You can also use the file encoding of the Universal Ink Model to exchange ink content between applications and cross-platform.

The Universal Ink Model provides the flexibility required for a variety of applications since the display of pen data is only one aspect. For example, the same data can be used for data mining or even signature comparison, while the ink display can be on a range of platforms potentially requiring different scaling and presentation.

In addition, it enables the semantic meaning of digital ink to be interpreted by applications. This opens the door to, for example, linking to additional web-based information about a word, as it is added to a document with a digital pen. The file encoding of the Universal Ink Model can also be used to exchange ink content between applications and across platforms.

Key Features

• Input data: a collection of data repositories, holding raw sensor input, input device/provider configurations, sensor channel configurations, etc. Each data repository keeps certain data-set isolated and is responsible for specific type(s) of data
• Ink data: the visual appearance of the digital ink, presented as ink geometry with rendering configurations
• Metadata: related meta-data about the environment, input devices, etc.
• Ink trees / views: a collection of logical trees, representing structures of hierarchically organized paths or raw input data-frames
• Semantic triple store: an RDF compliant triple store, holding semantic information, such as text structure, handwriting recognition results, and semantic entities