Radio is familiar and important media, especially for elderly people and persons with visually impaired. The community-broadcasting offices are also increasing, because they are useful at the time of disaster.
To make the regional information programs, however, take the time and effort of news-gathering.
From this viewpoint, we developed a system “O’ra-be” for broadcasting voice messages posted by telephone, which is useful for small radio broadcasting offices.
The development of O’ra-be was initially supported by Mitou Software Development Program of IPA (Information-technology Promotion Agency), Japan in 2005.
In the IPAX 2009 conference, held in Tokyo on May 27-28, 2009, the first public demonstration of O’ra-be system is going to performed.
Our project did not perform patent query in Japan, and the right was abandoned. The source code and public application server is going to prepared for open use (please see my page on github later).
The system development is anticipated to make more progress through work to introduce Ruby on Rails into implementation part of database and Web application. Moreover, we will appeal for participation in development by shifting to open-source project.
With economic conditions of these days, that “down-sizing” of broadcast advances in every scene is expected as well as individual and small broadcasting station.
Personal computer and the Internet realized the world that anyone can enjoy computer environment of superior quality in low cost. In the same way, it is expected that a broadcast support system will be the important infrastructure in the society and life.
O’ra-be is specialized in user interface for contribution file editing in live broadcasting, and it is extendable to handle video sources. On the basis of the spread of podcasts or video sharing sites in these days, cooperation with existing services can enter visual field in the future.
