Project Name: DAISY Pipeline

Date: 2007-09-21

Overview

Needs Statement

Organisations producing and distributing DAISY DTBs are facing an increasing complexity in terms of production and distribution models. This complexity is partly caused by the need to be able to transform content between different formats in a simple and economic manner. Examples of transformation needs include:

• Transformation of documents between different formats. In a production context, a file received from a publisher may be in a format other than that directly used by DAISY. In a distribution context, a DAISY master document may need to be transformed to a specific delivery format (e.g. electronic or printed Braille, E-text, Daisy Text-Only DTB).
• Converting DTBs between different standards. In an archival context, a DTB or a document needs to be migrated to ensure longevity. In a distribution context, a DTB may need to be converted to a specific version of the DAISY standard in order to be useable on certain reading devices.

The long term aim of the DAISY Pipeline project is to build a single point of coordination for DAISY-related document/fileset transformation developers in order to:

• efficiently and economically meet the rapidly increasing needs for conversion and transformation utilities within the DAISY community and to the wider community
• minimize overlap and duplication
• ensure maximum sharing
• enable creation of common, reusable components
• enable efficient interoperability - "chaining" of associated processes.

Strategy to Address this Need

Develop and provide a framework for document- and DTB-related transformations. Make this framework available with business-friendly licensing to allow both not-for-profit and for-profit use (and refinement) of the programs, and encourage contributions from the open source community.

Who Will Benefit

DAISY Consortium members and others engaging in the activities described above; commercial companies that wish to take advantage of existing, available open source tools which can be built upon.

Project Description and Scope

Note - This is a request for rechartering of a project that has been ongoing for several years. This charter includes only deliverables relating to the Pipeline core application - major new functionality additions, such as the DAISY content migration suite, are run as separate projects.

The DAISY Pipeline project has so far been driven through a combination of DC staff resources, and resources volunteered by the DAISY Community members. In terms of staffing costs, the volunteered part has so far exceeded the part paid directly by the DC.

As the Pipeline application is now beginning to be used throughout the world, we expect to see a higher throughput of contributions. At the same time, it should be noted that the communities increasing adoption of the tool will also put higher demands on DC staff to provide support, services, releases, patches and address feature requests.

In Scope

A framework providing automated DTB- and document-related transformations, deployable by members, friends and other non-profit organizations and commercial companies, in desktop and server-side settings.

Documentation of the different transformations available within the framework

A cross-platform graphical user interface (GUI), for desktop deployment

Document transformation Web services using the Pipeline as a core component

Out of Scope

Interactive editing of content

Business-logic layers surrounding a server-side deployment

Deliverables

Note - the deliverable list below does not include the list of ongoing additions to the transformation functionality. New functionality, donated by members and friends, is underway at the time of writing, and will be included in upcoming releases as it matures and stabilizes. Under normal circumstances, it is an ongoing function of the DC staff to manage and assist in the development of such feature additions. Further, transformations that are of extra high strategical importance from a DAISY Consortium point of view, are run as separate projects.

A) Usability improvement: End User Pedagogics and Documentation

The application has initially been written to support larger-scale production houses; however public commentary indicates that the application could also serve an important role in smaller, even home user, environments. To enable this, the workflow in terms of ease-of-use and supporting documentation needs review and updates.

The work items of this deliverable are 1)updates and additions to the existing documentation suite to cater for less technically savvy users 2)a document providing an analysis of current user interface and workflow from a less technically savvy user point of view, suggesting possible changes and/or enhancements to the application user interface.

B) Usability improvement: Installation and Update processes

For the same reason as in the deliverable above, the application installation and update processes needs to be implemented in a user-friendly way.

The work items of this deliverable are: 1) application installers for Windows, Mac and Linux; 2)Implementation of an online update feature including automatic notification of available updates/patches, and automatic installation of these without the need to reinstall the whole application.

C) Usability improvement: Localization and Internationalization

As the intended user base of the application is global, it is very important to assure that the application can adapt to various locales, and that input and output can handle any script and/or language.

The work items of this deliverable are 1) a localization of the application functionality to a non-english script (preferably thai or hindi); 2)an end-user friendly localization manual, written in english.

D) Usability improvement: Accessibility of User Interface

The application is cross-platform, and is intended to work well with access devices (primarily screen readers and magnifiers) on the Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. The fundamental design and framework for supporting accessibility already exists; but this design needs review and refinements by accessibility specialists to assure that the goals are met.

The items of this deliverable are 1) Documented per-platform reviews of screen reader and magnifier accessibility issues, accompanied by suggested solutions; 2)a list, ratified by the development team, of changes to be done to the application interface.

E) Usability improvement: Reduction of Input Sensitivity

The application usability can be improved considerably by reducing the sensitivity for variations and/or errors in the input data, in other words, increasing the error tolerance. Several of the existing transformation routines (such as those taking WordML, Open Office Writer and DTBook XML as input) need refactoring in order to recover gracefully from document structure variations and errors.

The work item of this deliverable is a completed refactoring of relevant libraries in the application.

F) Service addition: pipeline.daisy.org and validator.daisy.org

The DAISY Pipeline has been developed to address both desktop and server-side usage. To demonstrate the server-side use case, and at the same time provide useful services to the DAISY community, the two web sites pipeline.daisy.org and validator.daisy.org will be established. The web service pipeline.daisy.org will be a basic reference implementation that offers single-file document transformations (WordML to DTBook as an example) via a submission form, and offer returns via email. The reference implementation will be hosted by a project contributor organisation. The validator.daisy.org service will expose the validation framework built within the Pipeline, and allow primarily DTBook validation, allowing the appending of organisation-specific requirements. The validator.daisy.org website will be hosted by the DAISY Consortium

Time line

Estimated Number of Required Face-to-face Meetings and/or Frequency

Deliverable F will require one F2F between DC staff (Kathy Kahl, Markus Gylling, Romain Deltour)

Deliverable C will require one F2F between DFA staff, (Markus Gylling and Romain Deltour)

Frequency of Conference Calls

For core group, weekly, for contributors, varying.

Project Leadership, Experts, and Staffing

Project Lead: Markus Gylling

DAISY Consortium Staff Participant: Markus Gylling

Core Project group members: (names and company or organization they represent.

• Romain Deltour (DC)
• Kathy Kahl (DC) (for deliverable F)
• Markus Gylling (DC)
• Avneesh Singh (DC) (for deliverable B and D)

Budget/financial Summary

Strategic/political issues to be considered in the project

The DAISY Pipeline is a prime example of DCs strategy to develop re-usable components under a business-friendly licensing scheme. The strategic and political issues underlying this strategy have been discussed elsewhere.

Risk Management

Threat: DC Staff resources are insufficient to keep a reasonable service and maintenance level
Probability: Medium.
Risk Action Plan: Mitigation. As the framework stabilizes further during the 2008 project phase, we will have a better measure of what the maintenance costs will be. The level of maintenance possible will depend on additional funding.

Threat: Contributor withdrawal leads to discontinuation of certain existing functionality
Probability: High
Risk Action Plan: Acceptance. Given the nature of the project as a framework/host for multiple transformation types, it is a natural risk that certain functionality is discontinued when and if there is no continued community support for it. Under normal circumstances, DC staff does not take on the task of maintaining functionality originally committed by other contributors. This general rule does not apply to functionality of extra high long term strategic importance, such as functionality relating to content migration; here, DC staff may when needed step in to assure longevity and stability.

Threat: Uptake in commercial sector does not meet expectations
Probability: Low
Risk Action Plan: Mitigation. Uptake in commercial sector can be stimulated through dedicated outreach efforts.

Date considered by Board: XXX