C-DAC technology for DW-Online (Deutsche Welle Online)

CASE STUDY

2003

Deutsche Welle the German broadcasting service has online services in Bengali and Hindi, a first among the leading international broadcasting organizations. An Urdu service is also slated to begin soon.

Deutsche Welle (DW), a German international broadcasting service offers a global package of programmes for radio, television and the Internet in different languages including German, English and Spanish. DW's highly regarded training centre: DWFZ, provides comprehensive training to broadcasters from the developing world as well as eastern and south-eastern Europe. It offers courses in journalism, technology and administration, in Cologne (radio) and in Berlin (television).

Recently, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) assisted DW-WORLD.DE - the multilingual and multimedia-based internet address of Deutsche Welle to expand its Bengali, Hindi and Urdu Service. C-DAC's GIST facilitated the expansion of DW-WORLD.DE by developing special Open-type fonts suitable for the complex nature of the DW-Online framework. The settings of the Content Management Service (CMS) based platform, to streamline the framework of the multilingual online service, established a requirement for characters of all the scripts to be in the Unicode standard. Latin based scripts like German, English, Turkish or Bahasa Indonesia could be easily integrated into the system. Scripts like Amharic, Dari, Pashtu, Bengali, Urdu and so on. were not fully developed as usable Unicode-based characters or Open type fonts. C-DAC's GIST took up the challenge for Bengali, Hindi and Urdu scripts and developed a tailor-made solution to meet the specific requirements of DW-Online. The process involved extensive interaction between C-DAC GIST and DW to address finer details and the process is ongoing to incorporate further improvements in the future. The Bengali and Hindi Services of DW-Radio have also been using C-DAC GIST products like iLEAP & LEAP Office 2000 with satisfaction.

"When the requirement for a Bengali Open-type font came up, C-DAC's GIST was the natural partner. During my visit to C-DAC last year I was quite pleasantly surprised to meet a young, competent and vibrant team of employees full of innovative ideas. It was certainly not something one would expect in a state controlled organization. During my long and detailed interaction with C-DAC regarding the development of the Bengali Open-type font I was even more impressed by the flexibility, innovation and speed of work in C-DAC. There were solutions practically for all problems", comments Sanjiv Burman, Editor, Bengali-Service, Deutsche Welle.

The new Bengali online service is the first of its kind offered by any leading international broadcasting organization.