The potential of Wikis for producing DAISY DTBook contents

Alex Bernier, Dominique Burger, Bruno Marmol

Presentation and context (1/2)

BrailleNet works for visually impaired people, to improve the accessibility of :

Hélène is a project supported by BrailleNet which provides :

A repository for transcribers to save and share the books they adapt
A book delivery service (library) for invididual users
A production service to structure books and make them available for library users

Technical context :

A repository with 4000 DTBook files produced by Save as DAISY or ODT2DAISY
DTBook is the central format of the delivery service but not of the production chain

Aims:

A website to collaboratively edit contents
On user side: viewable with a Web browser
On server side: a Wiki software (MediaWiki, DokuWiki, MoinMoin...)
Page edition is done using Wikitext (a simple markup language) or a WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) Editor)
It is possible to warn the Wiki administrator when a page is edited
Access control mechanisms are available to limit access to only selected users/groups

An open-source software distirbuted under the GPL license
Used by projects like Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikibooks
Developed and supported by a dynamic community
Widely extendable: ability to ad d new tags in the Wikitext language, to customize the page display, etc
Already used (with the ProofreadPage extension) for book correction in the Wikisource project: each scanned image of a book page is displayed beside the corresponding OCRed text

Put contents in the Wiki:
- Import existing DTBook files
- Import images of a scanned book and the corresponding text
Correct and structure imported contents
Properly display these contents with the Web browser for verification
Get back DTBook after structuration and correction

Wikitext has a simpler syntax than DTBook (for lists and tables creation)
But Wikitext is not as expressive as DTBook
Wikitext should be extended with new tags to support page numbering, producer notes, etc
To keep edition ease, Wikitext should also keep its syntax as simple as possible
We have created an extended Wikitext, a mix of original Wikitext and DTBook
Not possible to clearly specify the extended Wikitiext beacause there is no grammar for original Wikitext
We have created a converter (XSLT) from DTBook to extended Wikitext

After the content has been corrected and structured in extended Wikitext, we want to get a DTBook file
We have created a converter from Extended Wikitext to DTBook
It uses the Wiki2XML extension
It works with the MediaWiki parser
The MediaWiki parser performs basic tasks (like templates expanding)
Wiki2XML transforms the result given by the parser in a dialect of XML
An XSLT stylesheet makes the last convertion in DTBook

Evolutions: