Open Scriptures

Recently, there has been a surge of posts on Open Scriptures. If you haven’t been able to follow them all, here are some of the most exciting threads.

• The Open Scriptures code is moving to GitHub, from Google Code Project Hosting. See our page http://github.com/openscriptures.
• The Open Scriptures website is being redeveloped in Pinax. This is a major change which will allow us to define our projects more clearly as well as become the platform upon which we can build our applications. We are looking to abandon Google Groups. See the Openscriptures.org Redevelopment thread for more information. Special thanks to James Tauber at Eldarion for his generosity in hosting and setting up our new site! We’ll be announcing the beta site soon.
• New group activity kicked off by post, Standardizing on a Web Infrastructure and Web Service API for Scripture, sent to Bible Technologies Group, Crossway, CrossWire, Bible.org, and others. We discussed work on a new edition of OSIS. We are actively talking with Bible.org (NET Bible) and the Crossway (ESV) about ways to promote openness and interoperability.
• We’ve started some excellent dialogue with the Open Siddur project and their lead developer Efraim Feinstein.
• Reminder about preserving the right for a worker to receive his wages.
• The group decided on a common license for our projects, Creative Commons BY-SA. The bulk of the discussion may be found under WLC Lexical Tagging.
• We discussed our channels of communication in the Regular Meetings over IRC or Google Wave thread. The unofficial conclusion is that we do need to have some regular real-time meetings. However, the new Pinax site will also allow for focused collaboration that may alleviate some of the barriers we are experiencing.
• We also decided to use the name “MorphHB” for an open project collecting the morphology of the Hebrew Bible. The thread Decision about how to name the project – Morphology and the WLC has more information.
• We discussed word-level linking between texts.
• We are also now nailing down our the goals for the project, and will be releasing a more refined project description soon.
• We also discussed the naming of our project. The “slug” we used on Google was “open-scriptures” but we are standardizing on “openscriptures”, as on Twitter and GitHub.

There are many more important threads that I will leave for your perusal at our Google Groups site. Over the course of the next few weeks expect to see some more explanations of what we have been discussing. Please feel free to join in the conversations!

The exciting news this week is the dialogue that Weston has been carrying on with Dr. Bertram Salzmann from the German Bible Society. In a nutshell, we are working together to create a developer platform that will give access to the copyrighted texts that GBS maintains (such as the renown UBS GNT) along with other openly-licensed works already available online. The conceptual outline that Dr. Salzmann has proposed keeps GBS’s texts under their umbrella by means of hosting the texts and the applications that make use of them. This is somewhat different than the original idea that Weston proposed in which Open Scriptures would be more of a true mediator between open source developers and content providers like GBS. In any case, the applications would be made available free of charge. The exact details have yet to be figured out. Many thanks to Dr. Salzmann and GBS for their innovative forward-thinking proposal! Please help by joining in on the conversation!

Welcome to Open Scriptures Roundup!  This is the first instalment of what will be a weekly synopsis of what’s been going on at Open Scriptures.  The goal is to keep everyone who is interested updated on the status of the projects we are working on as well as provide information that can point out where help is needed.

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!