DAISY Pipeline 2

The DAISY Pipeline 2 is an open-source, cross-platform framework for the automated processing of digital content in and between various file formats. It intends to facilitate the production and maintenance of accessible content for people with print disabilities.

Accessibility

The Pipeline was developed by and for the DAISY community, a group of organizations committed to making content accessible. It goes without saying that accessiblity is the main interest of the tool. There are Pipeline transformation for migrating from one accessible format to another, enriching an input format with certain accessible features, and producing formats targeting a specific disability.

Standards

Accessibility goes hand in hand with standards. The file formats that the Pipeline primarily focuses on are EPUB 3, DAISY and PEF.

Standards are also important under the hood. The system is based on standard XML processing technologies, notably W3C recommendations like XProc and XSLT 2.0, but also XPath 2.0, OASIS XML Catalogs, etc. These technologies are platform neutral, supported by active communities, and easy to maintain.

Cross-platform

The application can be run on most common operating systems. It must be run in a Java runtime environment, but its platform neutral RESTful API (web service) allows it to be called from any programming language and makes it interoperable with heterogenous production workflows.

In addition to the programming interface there is also a command-line interface and there are graphical user interfaces.

Modular

The system was designed with a modular architecture. Modularity is the key to a better scalability and extensibility. Processing functionality is provided by cohesive and reusable software components, called “modules”. The runtime framework is backed by a service-oriented and dynamic module system (OSGi).

Collaborative

The project is led and maintained by the DAISY Consortium but involves several member organizations. This reduces the duplication of effort and ensures maximum sharing of best practices among the user community.

Open-source

All software products maintained by the DAISY Consortium are available under a business-friendly licence (LGPL). This in order to stimulate collaboration between organizations and to maximize reuse and integration in other contexts, including commercial software.

Find out how you can join the community.

Get up and running

Download the latest version of DAISY Pipeline 2 and find out how it works.

Background

The DAISY Pipeline is a collaborative project maintained by the DAISY Consortium, with numerous organizations participating and contributing to the development. The DAISY Pipeline 2 project is the follow-up of the DAISY Pipeline 1 project.

The initial DAISY Pipeline project was started in 2006. Since then, new standards and technologies have emerged and have been embraced in a total redesign of the DAISY Pipeline framework.

The overarching principles remain the same:

By adopting modern standards (and off-the-shelf implementations of those standards), version 2 of the project aims to