Master Title Goes on These Lines

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Gold to Fine Jewelry, NIMAS-DAISY, Tools of the
Trade
Markus Gylling and Daniel Weck Session
F0503 Friday , January 30, 2008 0915 -
1015 Room "Bonaire 3"
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What is DAISY?

• The DAISY Standard
• DAISY "Digital Accessible Information SYstem"
• an open standard for accessible electronic
  multimedia
• aimed at people who are blind, visually-impaired,
  or otherwise print-disabled (e.g. dyslexia,
  learning disabilities)
• one of the most successful and widely implemented
  information access technology
• a set of reusable components DAISY XML (Dtbook)
  used by NIMAS, DAISY XML and NCX navigation
  center used by industry-standard eBook format
  (IDPF ePub)

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What is DAISY?

• The DAISY Consortium
• non-profit worldwide organization
• collaborative development of the next-generation
  Digital Talking Books (DTB)
• standards maintenance agency, NISO
• implementation strategies (for production,
  exchange and use)

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Open Strategy

• Standardization
• maintenance agency for existing DAISY 3.0
  specification (ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005)
• ongoing work for DAISY-next-generation
• reference implementations "A standard without an
  open implementation is vulnerable"

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Open Strategy

• Fundamental software tools for the community
• increase productivity of those who produce
  accessible material "Help those that provide to
  provide more, faster"
• support developing countries and emerging markets
  
• help making DAISY available in mainstream
  publishing "The Best Way to Read, the Best Way
  to Publish"

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Open Strategy

• Incentive for business use
• commercial-friendly licensing policy LGPL
  (Lesser General Public License) / BSD (Berkeley
  Software Distribution)
• cost-effective development model enhancements of
  existing products, feature incorporation (e.g.
  content validation, migration, transformation...)
  
• shorten the time-to-market for companies entering
  the domain

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Open-Source Software Summary

• Conformance validators
• Digital Talking Books (DTB), e.g. Daisy 2.02,
  ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2002/2005
• Document formats, e.g. DAISY XML, DTBook and NCX
  (also used by industry-standard "IDPF/ePub" eBook
  format)
• Automated production
• "The DAISY Pipeline" framework for DTB and
  document-related transformations

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Open-Source Software Summary

• Interactive authoring
• "The Urakawa SDK" (Software Development Toolkit)
• "Obi" easy-to-use, lightweight application,
  optimized for rapid production of audio-only DTBs
  (NCX/NCC-only)
• "Tobi" fully-fledged production tool, extensible
  rich-media authoring, shared application framework

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Production Flow Automated vs Interactive

• Multimedia production continuum with automation
  on one end, and interactive authoring at the
  other end
• Automated processing well-defined content types
  and document grammars, repetitive tasks
• Interactive authoring human-driven (i.e.
  narration), fine-tuning of automatically-generated
  material
• Common characteristic applications produce valid
  content!

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DAISY Pipeline Framework for Automated Production

• Input (production) stage
• Current support WordML 2003/2007, Open-Office
  (ODF), RTF, DTBook/DAISY XML
• To be used in conjunction with manual editing
  environments
• Output (publishing) stage
• DAISY 3 (ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005) and Daisy 2.02
  Digital Talking Books
• Audio (MP3) Playlists
• E-Text ePub, OPS 2.0, OCF, XHTML, RTF, Latex
  etc.

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DAISY Pipeline Framework for Automated Production

• For library maintenance and migration
• Validation
• DTB and XML document format migration tools
  (upwards, downwards)

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DAISY Pipeline Framework for Automated Production

• Deployment and Integration
• As a desktop application (Microsoft Windows,
  Apple Mac OS X, Linux), Command-Line only or with
  a Graphical User Interface
• As a Web service ("server-side")
• By integrating components with other applications

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DAISY Pipeline Framework for Automated Production

• Vendor adoption patterns
• "Lift" one or several Transformers into a
  commercial application
• Sell (and provide support for) proprietary
  Pipeline Transformers

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Pipeline Desktop GUI
Demonstration
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Save-as-DAISY (Pipeline included in MS Word and
Open Office)
Demonstration
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Pipeline Online Server Side Service

• Providing a distributed system for running DAISY
  Pipeline jobs.
• Usable in a LAN and WAN context.
• Deployed in Norway now!

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Deployment options

• The application provides several ways to run a
  Pipeline Job
• queue based Queues are used to provide a means
  for distributing system resources among multiple
  usages. For example, in a setup where several
  universities are using the same deployed
  application, each university would have its own
  queue. Jobs in the same queue are executed
  sequentially, and queues are run in parallel.
• instant Jobs are executed instantly without
  queuing. This is typically used for non-resource
  intensive job types (such as XML validation).

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Deployment options

• The application provides several ways to run a
  Pipeline Job
• scheduled Added Jobs are executed at a time
  given by the user.
• automatically from sniffing Jobs are
  automatically instantiated and added to a
  queue/executed when a certain precondition is met
  (such as an input file appearing in a predefined
  location).

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Obi and Tobi Interactive Multimedia Authoring

• both projects use the "Urakawa SDK" library
  (Software Development Kit) to reduce
  implementation costs
• "Obi" easy-to-use, lightweight application,
  optimized for rapid production of audio-only DTBs
  (NCX/NCC-only)
• "Tobi" fully-fledged production tool, extensible
  rich-media authoring, shared application
  framework

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Obi, Audio-Centric DAISY DTB Authoring

• 1.0 release in December 2008
• C.NET 2.0 implementation, Windows-only (WinForms
  GUI)
• produces valid DAISY 3 (ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005)
  Digital Talking Books
• integrates with the DAISY-Pipeline backend to
  provide additional format conversion services
• possibility to downgrade to DAISY 2.02 legacy
  format using the DAISY-Pipeline

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Obi, Audio-Centric DAISY DTB Authoring

• audio-only DAISY editor (no text other than
  simple labeling)
• recording tool, automatic phrase detection, basic
  audio editing with waveform rendering
• integrated table of content editor
• optimized workflow for rapid production
• lightweight GUI, accessible to screen readers

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Obi, Audio-Centric DAISY DTB Authoring

• developed by international team of programmers
  (India, France, England, USA)
• quality-controlled by dedicated team of testers
  (end-users, not developers)

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Obi Screenshot

• recording of the audio prompts for the
  self-voicing user-interface of the AMIS DAISY
  player
• novice user from Kazakhstan, providing human
  narration in his native language

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Obi Demonstration
Demonstration
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Tobi, Next-Generation Multimedia Authoring

• 0.1 release in January 2009 (first alpha public
  release)
• C.NET 3.5 implementation, Windows-only (WPF GUI)
  
• 3-fold adoption strategy, 3 types of target
  audience
• addresses real-world production needs produces
  valid DAISY 3 (ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005) Digital
  Talking Books
• extensible application framework allows
  commercial external contributions (i.e. plugins)
  and organization-specific customizations
• supports innovation experimentation platform for
  reference implementations of DAISY-next-generation
  standard (parallel specification work)

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Tobi, Next-Generation Multimedia Authoring

• integrates with the DAISY-Pipeline backend to
  provide additional format conversion services
• simple audio wave form editing, table of content
  authoring, etc.
• rich-media synchronization of multiple streams
  of information, not limited to text/image and
  audio (i.e. future support for accessible video,
  captions, audio descriptions)

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Tobi, Next-Generation Multimedia Authoring

• flexible authoring workflow, lets the author
  engage in a creative process
• customizable document templates and application
  setups, ability to meet the requirements of
  different producers or publishing organizations

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Tobi Screenshot
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Tobi Demonstration
Demonstration
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Summary of DAISY Open-Source Strategy

• Automated production workflow the "DAISY
  Pipeline" (command-line, server-side, desktop,
  and integrated with mainstream tools like MS-Word
  or Open-Office)
• Interactive authoring the "Urakawa Project",
  "Obi" and "Tobi" desktop applications
  (human-driven editing, creative productivity)
• Content validation paramount across the entire
  application spectrum

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Summary of DAISY Open-Source Strategy

• Business-friendly industry-standard software
  licenses (LGPL/BSD)
• All applications can be customized to meet
  organizations-specific requirements
• Collaborative policy allows early-access for
  adopters, contributors, users
• Open process requirement-gathering, design,
  implementation, quality-assurance, deployment /
  system integration, etc.

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Questions and Answers

• DAISY Consortium http//daisy.org
• DAISY Pipeline http//daisymfc.sourceforge.net
• Obi http//daisy-trac.cvsdude.com/obi
• Tobi http//daisy-trac.cvsdude.com/tobi
• Markus Gylling markus.gylling_at_tpb.se
• Daniel Weck daniel.weck_at_gmail.com

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Thank You!
Thank you for attending this session and for
celebrating our 10th Anniversary at ATIA 2009
Orlando! Watch for us in Chicago this
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