Open Scriptures

A couple of us are presenting at the BibleTech:2010 conference in San Jose, California. Weston Ruter is presenting:

Open Scriptures API: Unified Web Service for Scriptural Linked Data

The OSIS XML standard provides for a lot of free variation in the way it represents scriptural constructs (such as verse boundaries). Because of this, different OSIS documents encoding the same work may have vastly different DOM trees, which make automated traversal of arbitrary OSIS documents very difficult. Aside from this fact, the DOM is not a very programmer-friendly way to query for scriptural data to begin with. In this era of web services and mashups, having a standard, unified way to access scriptural data is a prerequisite for scriptural applications to take off in the same way that applications based on other common datasets have (such as maps). Furthermore, these scriptural datasets should be all explicitly interconnected as Linked Data of the Semantic Web, so that any metadata attached to a word in one translation would also be available to any other translation or manuscript by means of their interconnections. So while OSIS XML is “a common format for many visions”, this talk will explore “a common API for many datasets”; this will be a continuation of BibleTech:2009’s talk: “Open Scriptures: Picking Up the Mantle of the Re:Greek – Open Source Initiative”.

James Tauber is presenting, in addition to “A New Kind of Graded Reader”:

Using Pinax and Django For Collaborative Corpus Linguistics

Django is a popular, Python-based Web framework. Pinax is a platform for rapidly building sites on top of Django, particular sites with a strong collaborative focus.

After introducing Django and Pinax, we will discuss Pinax-based tools the speaker is developing to help with web-based collaboration on corpus annotation with applications from lexicography to morphology to syntax to discourse analysis.

And there are many other fascinating talks lined up. Hope to see you there!