Overview

The project is split in two phases that will be carried out successively during a 3-year time frame. A side objective is to coordinate the roadmap with the formal release of the ANSI/NISO DAISY Z39.86-2010 revision as a NISO standard in mid 2011.

The project will span over 42 months (3.5 years) and focus on delivering iterative releases on a regular schedule (every 6 months), with additional intermediary milestones for the finalization of each phases. See also the project charters for a description of the work items and tentative milestones.

Ongoing

The following is a tentative roadmap for the current development phase. The dates and objectives may be changed and adapted to the development pace.

Q1 2013

Initial release of a set of utility scripts that perform markup fix-up and cleaning on a variety of formats: DTBook, HTML, EPUB 3. The scripts allow to recover from validation errors in the best case, and generally improve the overall markup quality. The built-in set of fixing/cleaning heuristics can be extended by providing a custom distribution of the modules.

Initial release of the HTML to EPUB 3 conversion script.

EpubCheck 3.0 is fully integrated as a Pipeline 2 module, allowing built-in EPUB 3 validation in the production workflows. DAISY Authoring and Interchange validation is also supported.

The developer documentation is complete.

Q2 2013

The framework is refactored to introduce advanced functionality. Configurability of the many internal settings is improved and harmonized. A mechanism is introduced to declare rich "types" on the conversion scripts' settings, this typing info can notably be used by Pipeline front-ends to create more accurate UI widgets for the creation of conversion jobs.

The testing framework is improved. It is now possible to run XSLT and XProc unit tests automatically when building from the sources. It allows to catch errors more systematically and assists with the developers' daily chores.

Initial release of a set of modules to add text-to-speech annotations when producing EPUB 3 publications. It relies on standard EPUB 3 features that allow finer control on how an EPUB 3 book is rendered by the reading system's TTS engines. It does not use audio files and Media Overlays.

Q3 2013

Maintenance release of the existing modules.

Initial release of a lightweight Graphical User Interface (GUI), i.e. a basic sequence of dialogs that can be used to easily configure a Pipeline job and access its results. The GUI is embeddable in broader third-party tools (à la Save as DAISY + Pipeline Lite combination).

The Web UI features a "validation mode" where it can be installed with a streamlined interface to run validation jobs only.

Initial release of a set of modules that allow the production of audio books using speech syntheses. It notably exposes a "DAISY Authoring and Interchange to EPUB 3 with Media Overlays" conversion script.

Q4 2013

Maintenance release of the existing modules. The TTS-based production scripts are further consolidated and improved.

History

~~Inception Phase~~

The inception phase will span over the first few months of the project, most probably till the end of 2009. Its objectives are mostly to identify key use case scenarios and requirements, evaluate key technologies, and draft an overall architectural design coherent with the technologies selection.

• Mid December 2009: review of the existing project proposal
• End of January 2010: draft charter (technical details not yet resolved can be mentioned)
• Early February 2010: call for formal participation commitment
• March 2010: finalization of the charter
• End of March 2010: finalized charter sent to the board

~~Q4 2010~~

• November 17-19, 2010: F2F in Zurich
• December 23, 2010: Early Preview Release

~~Q1/Q2 2011~~

Milestones

• Mid-April (e.g. week #15 or #16): F2F
• Beta 1 released on May 20, possibly followed by others till June 3 (2 weeks after).
• RC1 on June 10
• RC2 on June 24
• Release on July 1st

Framework work plan

• ⇒ Mid-February: basic build system
• ⇒ End of February: integration of modules (e.g. from the early preview) to the framework
• ⇒ End of March / Mid-April: messaging, XProc engine integration
• ⇒ Mid-April: F2F, discussion on pain points and design of WS layer
• ⇒ End of May: CLI finalization, development of WS
• ⇒ June: bug fixes

Converters work plan

• DTBook to ZedAI
  • should be finished by April f2f
• ZedAI to HTML (early dev, in progress)
  • ⇒ mid-March: all ZedAI/HTML5 element mappings reviewed
  • ⇒ mid-April: early XSLT
  • f2f: discuss pain points
• ZedAI to EPUB3
  • note: depending on EPUB3 (public draft on February 14th)
  • => mid-Feb: identify remaining steps and utility modules
  • => mid-April (f2f): early EPUB3 production
• ZedAI to DTBook
  • TBD: when to start ? (should be easier after ZedAI to HTML and DTBook to ZedAI)
• DAISY 2.02 to EPUB3 (optional)
  • TBD: when to start ?

~~Q2 2011~~

• mid May
  • utility modules: specified in wiki pages
• end of May
  • utility modules: implementation of straightforward modules, dummy/placeholder modules for others
  • dtbook-to-zedai: finalized
  • zedai-to-html: main outline finalized
  • framework: port of the modules + build system operational
  • WS: preparation of the development (documentation reading, library choice, etc)
• mid June
  • framework: logging
• end of June
  • WS: working version (maybe partial) integrated with the framework
  • utility modules: implemented, xpath functions integrated
  • converters: everything implemented (may not be finalized, but functional)

~~Q2 2012~~

• Mid May 2012
  • Framework: Persistence layer
  • Framework: metadata cleanup
  • Web UI: alpha version
  • WebUI: test server at NLB
• End of May 2012
  • Framework: event bus for messaging
  • Framework: new build system experimentations
  • Web UI: alpha version
• Mid-June 2012
  • Web UI: feature-complete version
• End of June 2012:
  • HTML to EPUB 3 (limited functionality)
  • HTML Fixer (limited functionality)

~~Q4 2012~~

Version 1.4 is released.

• The framework is very stable, it supports running a large number of conversions with no stability or memory leak issues (tested against a portion of the Bookshare collection).
• "DTBook to EPUB" 3 is production-ready.
• initial public release of the "DAISY 3 to EPUB 3" conversion script, notably used by the Tobi/Obi team.
• initial public release of the "DTBook to HTML5" conversion script, notably used by the Tobi/Obi team.
• initial release of a new schema-based DTBook validator, supporting MathML validation.