DAISY Consortium Conversion & Production Tools

DAISY Pipeline 2: Overview & Objectives

The DAISY Pipeline is an open-source, cross-platform framework for document-related pipelined transformation. It supports the migration of digital content to various formats efficiently and economically, facilitating both production and distribution of DAISY Digital Talking Books. The Pipeline 2 Project Charter was published in February 2010.

Purpose of Pipeline 2

To develop a next generation framework for automated production of accessible materials for people with print disabilities. It is the follow-up and total redesign of the original DAISY Pipeline 1 project.

Overarching Principle

To adopt recent platform-neutral standards (and off-the-shelf implementations of those standards) at the heart of a comprehensive framework, which will:

• minimize development and maintenance costs, allowing developers to focus more on actual transformations rather than the engine that drives the transformations
• lower the framework learning curve
• increase interoperability with the diverse production workflows
• increase the likelihood of re-use in both open source and commercial applications.

Pipeline is, & Provides:

• Open Source
• Automated processing/transformations
• Modular conversions
• Supports a wide range of input and output formats
• Promotes the "single source master" approach
• Extensible and customizable

The DAISY Pipeline Online was developed in conjunction with the Norwegian Library of Talking Books and Braille and has been implemented.

Pipeline 2: the Next Generation

• Fundamental redesign towards an enterprise-grade solution
• Focus on platform neutral standards (W3C XProc, XSLT, etc.)
• Improve the interoperability with the mainstream
• A first reference implementation of DAISY 4
• Better support for EPUB
• ... and progressively increased functionality (Braille, TTS production)

Pipeline 2: Two development phases:

The project is split in two phases that will be carried out successively during a 3.5 year time frame.

1. Phase 1 (May 2010 to September 2011): Core redesign and support for DAISY 4 Authoring and Interchange
2. Phase 2 (September 2011 to September 2013): Extended functionality and deployment options
3. Dedicated working groups for specific tasks
   • Braille production
   • TTS-based production

The DAISY Pipeline project charter provides a description of the development phases.

Obi: Audio & Structure DAISY 3 Production Tool

Obi was designed to be easy to use, with minimal to no training required for users. It can be used in environments with a minimal production environment. The intended audience of Obi is medium to small scale DTB production environments and individual DAISY readers who want to create their own DAISY content. Obi:

• Outputs DAISY books with audio with structure
• Can be used to create DAISY books from MP3 files
• Is open source
• Available to anyone at no cost
• Incorporates the DAISY Pipeline-lite with the setup files to perform operations like MP3 encoding and DTB validation

On June 29, 2011, Obi 2.0 Beta was released with enhanced capability to handle large projects (which was one of the biggest issues with the software).

Tobi: Full Text & Audio DAISY 3 Production Tool

On August 5, 2011 Version 1.4.0.1 of Tobi, the DAISY Consortium's multimedia production tool was released.

Tobi Is:

• Open Source and available at no cost
• A multimedia production tool that currently supports DAISY 3 Digital Talking Books
• Designed to facilitate the process of synchronizing a text document with human narration (including page numbers, hierarchical table of contents, images, footnotes, etc.)
• Provides a live recording workflow that is fully-integrated with the structured text markup
• Built with extensibility in mind, based on a plugin architecture that greatly facilitates the development of new features, and the incorporation of external contributions.

It is also possible to import external audio clips - MP3 and WAV formats are currently supported. The zoomable and multilevel waveform editor support selection, delete, insert, cut/copy/paste, playback, punch-in punch-out recording, etc. Tobi offers a basic text editing feature. Basic structure editing is planned for a future release, however the text (XML) document should be created as part of the XML workflow, with Tobi for multimedia synchronization with the human narrated audio.

What Formats Does Tobi Support?

• Tobi supports the semantically-rich DTBook XML document format, which is currently used by the DAISY standard, the NIMAS framework and the EPUB format. DTBook documents can be created from scratch using the Save As DAISY addons for Microsoft Word and Open Office, or by converting from other formats using the open-source DAISY Pipeline tool.
• Tobi can import existing DAISY 3 full-text full-audio Digital Talking Books, making it easy to re-purpose or edit/correct existing DAISY 3 Digital Talking Books.
• Tobi currently exports to the DAISY 3 format but the DAISY Pipeline can be used to "downgrade" to a DAISY 2.02 fileset to support legacy reading devices.
• Tobi will support the upcoming revision of the DAISY Standard, and will be one of the early reference implementations of the new format (2011).

DAISY Online Delivery

The Specification for the DAISY Online Delivery Protocol was approved May 29, 2010 by the DAISY Consortium Board.

The DAISY Online Delivery protocol is a web service API (application programming interface) that facilitates the delivery of digital resources from service providers to end users. The protocol features a core set of operations that can be configured to enable a variety of different download models. It is a flexible and lightweight solution for online delivery. Plextor, HumanWare and Solution Radio were involved and have developed players which support the protocol.