[sword-devel] Food for thought regarding OSIS and some of its

[Chris Little]

DM Smith wrote:
> I've had similar experience. It appears that OSIS is geared to Biblical 
> texts and not other texts. The documentation regarding commentaries is 
> lacking. (Supposedly the support is present.) There is no support for 
> dictionaries, with the long promise that it is coming.

Basic dictionary encoding (i.e. <div type="entry"><title>blah</title> 
blah blah</div>) is possible. More complex things are really outside the 
scope of OSIS, so we will probably point users to TEI for dictionary 
markup. Complete dictionary support is really an impractically large 
problem for OSIS to solve. But for the needs of Sword, the existing OSIS 
schema is probably sufficient. (I know Troy wants to mark every little 
bit of information within an entry, but from the perspective of actual 
NEEDS, there's not much we would do with that other than presentational 
changes. In the future we may want to permit searching dictionaries by 
some of that internal data, but for the present we don't.)

  > I have also posted questions to this list regarding the "best" 
practices
> for marking a commentary for the creation of a module but have received 
> no reply.

I thought I had already posted that. If not, see my reply to Lynn. :)

> With that said, I think that OSIS is usable now for Bible modules. 
> Without guidance, it is not usable for commentary modules. Without an 
> improvement in the spec it is not usable at all for dictionaries.
> 
> What will provide traction for OSIS is a corpus of whole documents of 
> several different types marked up according to published best practices. 
> These types should include Bibles, BCV based Bible commentaries, general 
> biblical works, time based devotionals, and theological dictionaries.
> 
> I think that CrossWire has a unique ability to lead this effort. I think 
> that we should continue to push this direction.

Good ideas. :) I think we're kind of working in that direction, but 
there's much yet to be done.

--Chris