Open Scriptures

Update 2: Watch presentation from BibleTech:2010 (below).

Update: Watch presentation from BibleTech:2009 (below).

Note: The following writeup needs to be updated.

Open Scriptures seeks to be a comprehensive open-source Web repository for integrated scriptural data and a general application framework for building internationalized social applications of scripture. An abundance of scriptural resources are now available online—manuscripts, translations, and annotations are all being made available by students and scholars alike at an ever-increasing rate. These diverse scriptural resources, however, are isolated from each other and fragmented across the Internet. Thus mashing up the available data into new scriptural applications is not currently possible for the community at large because the resources’ interrelationships are not systematically documented. Open Scriptures aims to establish a scriptural database for interlinked textual resources such as merged manuscripts, the differences among them, and the links between their semantic units and the semantic units of their translations. With such a foundation in place, derived scriptural data like cross-references may be stored in a translation-neutral and internationalized manner so as to be accessible to the community no matter what language they speak or version they prefer.

Open Scriptures is all about Linked Data for scripture. Please watch Tim Berners-Lee‘s TED talk on “The next Web of open, linked data.” As Zack Hubert said at the BibleTech:2008, “It’s a community effort. Any time anything good happens, is because a real cool team of people have come together around an idea.” Open Scriptures seeks to be such a community effort.

Learn more:

• presentation at BibleTech:2009 available in video, audio, and slides
• the initial project writeup, written in October 2008
• “Redeeming the Ill-fated Re:Greek Project: a Call for Participation,” for some historical background
• “The Open Scriptures Project,” a writeup on Nerdlets

See the schemagraph of the database for a view into what’s going on. The source code is available on Google Code. Join the discussion group, and follow us on Twitter.

All code in the Open Scriptures project is released under the GPL 3.0 license, and all content is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0.