Tamás Kézdi, László Kovács, András Micsik, Máté Pataki:

Distributed digital voice repositories to serve community radios

There is a growing number of new radio stations serving communities or special interests. The aim of the StreamOnTheFly project of the EU is to design a distributed architecture and provide software environment which supports the operation of such community radios, the exchange of their programmes, the preparation and reuse of radio programmes.

This environment is a decentralised and self-organising network of digital libraries, which automatically replicates programme metadata. The project defined a metadata format based on Dublin Core especially for the needs of community radios, and an exchange format for the transfer and archival of radio programmes coupled with metadata called XBMF (Exchange Broadcast Binary and Metadata Format). The development of this digital library system has been done by the Department of Distributed Systems at MTA SZTAKI. There are additional software pieces for managing radio stations and for building radio portals. Further goal of this environment is to support the building of communities and the exchange of opinions and information.