Weston Ruter

I haven’t formally announced this here yet, but there is a newly designed Open Scriptures website with blog. Future posts regarding Open Scriptures will be posted there. There are two new posts, the first regarding the recently-unveiled exciting Tagged Tanakh project, and the second about redeeming the ill-fated Re:Greek Open Source Initiative with a call for participation. Check them out and subscribe to the feed.

Please also follow Open Scriptures on Twitter.

Join in on the discussion on the Google Group.

This morning I got inspired to go over some relatively old stuff that I worked on in college. There are several linguistics projects that I think are pretty interesting (the first three especially):

• Phonological Analysis of a Second Language
• Arabic Phonemes Represented by the Spanish Letter “J”
• Indo-European Cognates in Psalm 23 and the Beatitudes
• El alfabeto árabe
• Hamlet Word Origin Study
• Indo-European Word History of plek

And then I found an old chart I made of my racial makup.

And then there is a little web app for SPU’s Nickerson Signal which attempts to model a traffic signal so that upcoming crossing times can be predicted. (Didn’t end up accurately modeling reality.)

And finally there is the Semantic Linking tool (mentioned in my last post) which is a prototype for an upcoming tool which enables contributors to link the semantic units between manuscripts and translations.

This post has been moved to the Open Scriptures blog.

This post has been moved to the Open Scriptures blog.

(This post has been cross-posted on the Open Scriptures blog.)

For the past several years, I’ve been dreaming about an open source community-driven Web application for Scripture. In the past few months, things have really been kicking into high gear. At BibleTech:2009 I’m presenting the project in the talk Open Scriptures: Picking Up the Mantle of the Re:Greek – Open Source Initiative:

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.

Think of it as a Wikipedia for scriptural data. Just as Wikipedia has become the go-to place to find open encyclopedia information, Open Scriptures seeks to be the go-to place for open scriptural data. (Non-free data could also be stored, but it would be restricted to non-commercial personal use, as Wikipedia does with fair use or by obtaining special permission.)

Interested? The project needs you! I’d love for a core group of scholars and developers to come together with the shared vision of open access to scriptural data employing open standards and best practices of the Web.