There has also been some significant steps forward in the dialog between Weston and the German Bible Society; GBS has a tentative proposal which looks to be quite promising and beneficial for both communities. Look forward to an announcement hopefully next week.

To follow up my previous post concerning raw data I thought it would be good to give a discussion to linked data.  First of all, it must be emphasized that linked data cannot exist if there is not access to raw data.  So “raw data now,” then linked data.

This whole notion of linked data is really the idea of making data useful, really useful.  At a high level, a good example of linked data is Wikipedia.  In particular, take a look at this article about BSD.  As I type that sentence, I realize that many do not know that BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution.  Nor would many others guess that BSD happens to be the precursor to many flavors of operating systems, among them FreeBSD, NetBSD, MAC OS X, DragonFlyBSD, etc.  The point that I want to extract from the Wikipedia article is that there is a plethora of information in the article but there is also a plethora of links that one can access through the article.  Thus, if one wanted to learn about FreeBSD, the Wikipedia BSD article already has a link to it.  Further, one could read the FreeBSD page and find a nice graphical derivative, PC-BSD.  Without the basic implementation of links, these correlations would be much more difficult to come by.

On the internet, linking is the way to go.  If we zoom in a little bit, we may notice some interesting features of linking.  Let’s stick with Wikipedia, their main page boasts 27 different languages,  impressive.  Now, go ahead and return to our BSD article and on the bottom left select another language.  Now you have the same information, yet in a completely different language.  The data on the German page and the data on the English page should conceptually be the same information, yet because it is presented in those two different languages the article is now much more useful to many more people.  Now multiply that by 27 and it is very easy to see why Wikipedia has gained incredible worldwide appreciation.  How many languages can you get Encyclopedia Britannica in?

Alright, so those examples deal mainly with information in the form that we are used to seeing online, web pages.  What happens when we take a look at data itself?   Tim Berners-Lee uses census data as an example in his TED talk, but I thought it would be more interesting to look into Scriptural data.  In the field of Biblical Studies we have a lot of manuscripts.  What we don’t have is a lot of easy access to those manuscripts nor easy methods to compare.  However, that is changing!  As more of these manuscripts become available online (see these projects) we have the ability to link them together.  The Manuscript Comparator is a prototype of this linkage.  What the prototype accomplishes is systematically linking the data found in the manuscripts for simplified and complete comparison.  Sure, someone could get hard copies of each manuscript and manually compare them.  But anyone who has done ancient language study will surely appreciate the beauty and simplicity of this application.  To simply type in the passage that one is studying and then be able to easily view discrepancies is a huge resource!  Not only that but it demonstrates the power of linked data.

This is only the beginning for Biblical Studies, if you want to see what the collective mind of Open Scriptures dreams about when we consider linked data, check out the Potential Applications page.

This week we have made a lot of exciting progress.  For starters, the manuscript import and build scripts have been completely ported over to Python and tested!  This is a huge first step as it now allows us to work on creating applications that manipulate these manuscripts.  Weston is currently working on creating a Django app of the Manuscript Comparator.  If you would like to checkout the code follow the steps listed here.

Tregelles’s Greek New Testament Released!  Joyfully, we can report that the project has released the texts under the Creative Commons 3.0 Protocol (that is, CC BY-NC-SA).  This is very good news for Biblical Studies and especially for Open Scriptures.  The initial announcement is here.  The downloads may be accessed here.  Weston is working on updating the import and merge scripts to include these texts.

Lastly, there has been some very productive collaboration going on regarding Strong’s data.  For more information see the thread here, and another thread here.

To keep yourself abreast of all the news going on join the Open Scriptures Google Group.

See ya next week!

So what is open access to raw data and who really cares?  To the average user of the internet raw data is both trivial and essential.  It is trivial mainly because raw data by itself is not terribly interesting or useful.  However, raw data is absolutely essential because it is what drives the most popular websites in the world.  The key is how the raw data is linked together.

A very good analogy is that of a research paper.  When one sets out to write a detailed research paper, a first step is to collect information.  Often this is a very lengthy process, involving many hours online and in the library reading articles, books, and anything that pertains to the paper topic.  A common technique for keeping track of all of this information during this stage used to be 3 X 5 cards, but I think it is safe to say that there are computer programs that do a much better job today, e.g. Zotero.  Once this information gathering phase is finished, the writer has a formidable amount of raw data.  Yet, as mentioned above, this raw data is not particularly useful.  If the writer were to simply submit all of these separate pieces of information to the publisher/teacher/newspaper the paper would clearly be rejected.  The reason: raw data needs to be linked in meaningful ways.

This is where the second part of the writing process comes into play, actually writing.  The author takes all of the raw data that was collected and he or she sets out to tie it all together into a meaningful piece of literature.  Ideally, the finished product will contain most of the raw data but the paper will clearly demonstrate how each piece of information is related to the others and, perhaps most importantly, how each piece of information supports the writer’s thesis statement.

To the point, raw data is the essential first step in the process of presenting information in meaningful and helpful ways.  Thus, even though most web users do not seem to care about raw data, in reality, they actually care a great deal.  Content providers need to put their raw data online in a way that is accessible to developers so that they can do their job creating applications that make the data useful for the rest of the world.

Open Scriptures is committed to fostering the development of raw data on the internet so that developers will have access to the data that they need to create great web applications!  For an example of how raw data (manuscripts) may be linked together to create helpful web applications, see our Manuscript Comparator.

This only scratches the surface.  There is much more to raw data and especially to linked data than what is presented here.  For more information see http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html and look forward to another post detailing linked data.

In addition to the Directory, the Google Group is also serving as a way for people to collaborate. This week there has been an active thread discussing collaboration on Strong’s Dictionary data. David Troidl expressed the general sentiments well:

The idea of collaboration is great. I’ve already mentioned to Darrell that just the moral support is heartening. It’s nice to know, after all this time working alone, that there really are others out there who share the same interest. [...] I’ve been on my own all this time

I think it is essential to seek out others who are interested in the same things so that we can come together not only to build upon what each other has done, but to consolidate what we are doing as much as possible so that both duplicate efforts and fragmented data can be avoided. Not only will this lead to more productivity, but it will also serve to build community among those who share a common vision for open scriptural resources.

If you have a project that is not yet listed in the directory, please suggest the link. Please also join the Google Group!

BibleTech:2009

I finally got to meet the people behind the Tagged Tanakh project from the Jewish Publication Society; they presented in the talk “How the Ancient Rabbis Invented Web 2.0 Before Its Time.” When I learned about their project earlier this year, I got really excited because the Tagged Tanakh’s vision is almost identical to that of Open Scriptures except for its focus on the Jewish scriptures. JT Waldman is directing the project, and we really connected both personally and professionally. We immediately began collaborating and strategizing on how we can assist each other and work together to realize the common vision.

Bible.org was represented at the conference, and they also want to work together. Bible.org has had a very open policy with regard to licensing their New English Translation (NET), and they are looking for new ways to make it even more openly accessible. Open Scriptures is one such avenue, in addition to their existing NET Bible study tool. The NET Bible is a solid translation that includes a multitude of scholarly notes which will profoundly benefit resources that are integrated into the scriptural Semantic Web of Linked Data (again, see Tim Berners-Lee’s TED Talk).

Stephen Smith presented on “The Need for a Universal Bible Annotation Format.” Stephen, previously employed by Crossway as the developer of the ESV Online, is now employed at Zondervan and is working to bring the same openness he built into ESV Online to be taken to a larger scale at Bible Gateway, currently the most popular Bible website. Stephen is also the voice behind OpenBible.info where he, obviously, promotes openness of scriptural data. In his talk Stephen described a data format that would enable not only the portability of users’ data around the Web and among their devices, but it would also allow web apps to integrate scriptural data from across the Web, making possible new applications powered by this data. His talk examines the requirements for such a system and it outlines possible ways to implement it. He announced that the Open Scriptures Google Group would be where collaboration on such standardization would take place (see threads one and two).

Sean Boisen of Semantic Bible, who last year presented on Bibleref, this year presented on the Bible Knowledgebase (BK). The project’s goal is to identify and mine all of the people, places, and things in the Bible and to connect them all together into Linked Data. While this is a proprietary product of Logos, there is hope that the identifiers (URIs) used will be published so that the community can standardize on a common namespace.

And lastly, of course, I presented the Open Scriptures project itself, and I am thankful for how well it turned out. The multimedia from the talk is available.

1. video (below) on Vimeo
2. audio in MP3 format
3. slides (below) on SlideShare

The MP3 audio I recorded on my laptop during the talk; I’ll update this post with the official conference audio if its any better.

SlideShare didn’t convert the Keynote presentation perfectly (animations were lost, for example), so you can download the original if you would like (will not work in Microsoft PowerPoint).

Video

Slides

I’m working on a post that summarizes the important connections I made at the conference, and I hope to have that up here soon.

I’m eager to hear your comments and feedback regarding my talk.

The really important thing about data is the more things you have to connect together, the more powerful it is.

This is so key. If you have raw data for two resources, there is only a limited number of ways that this data can be combined together. However, each time you add in another raw data set, the number of combinations grows exponentially. Check out his talk…

Again, Open Scriptures is foundationally about Linked Data for Scripture, granularly interconnecting scriptural texts at the semantic level, and making this data openly accessible. The more links added between texts will result in views and applications of scriptural data never before possible!

Raw Data Now!