Initial Draft Edition, v1.00, 2024-10-08
Rick Brannan, rick.brannan@biblionexus.org, and Jessica Parks, jessica.parks@biblionexus.org
BiblioNexus and Biblica are working together to create data representing explicit and implicit instances of people and places (and other things) in the Bible. This information is being compiled as part of the ACAI project, the Aquifer Concept Architecture for Information, which itself is a part of the Bible Aquifer project.
- Biblica/Clear-Bible's Macula Hebrew
- Biblica/Clear-Bible's Macula Greek
- United Bible Societies' UBS Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (UBSDBH) and UBS Dictionary of the Greek New Testament (UBSDGNT). See SemanticDictionary.org for an implementation and the git repo ubs-open-license for data (English, French, Spanish, and Chinese). Macula Hebrew and Greek encode domains and references from these resources at the word level for most OT and NT words.
- United Bible Societies' Images. The Images project associates image data with particular words in the Bible text. The UBS images data also includes references to UBS Thematic Lexica for Fauna, Flora, and Realia.
- Copenhagen Alliance versification-specification. Bible references within this data reflect the 'ORG' scheme specified by the Copenhagen Alliance. This means that Old Testament references assume the versification structure of the Hebrew Bible, and New Testament references assume the structure of the Greek New Testament. For use with translations, the references may need to be be converted to the Copenhagen Alliance 'ENG' scheme. The repo cited above has information and sample code for how to achieve that; if assistance is needed please contact us.
Each of these sources are available as CC-BY-4.0 or CC-BY-SA-4.0 licensed data.
In particular, the UBS Dictionaries include information associating semantic entries with entries from the UBS Thematic Lexica (for Fauna, Flora, and Realia). These references allowed the aggregation of the bulk of the available data. Several of our English descriptions are directly inspired by these definitions. We owe much to the UBS team (and Reinier DuBlois in particular) for their work and for their licensing of the UBS Dictionaries under a CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.
In addition to these sources, BiblioNexus have done a significant amount of curation and supplementation in order to account for and model the data according to the needs of the ACAI project.
We have aggregated as much Flora data as possible from the UBS Hebrew and Greek Dictionaries and supplemented with references in the UBS Images. We hope to be able to utilize some of the information in the UBS Thematic Lexicon for Flora to provide a more complete picture of Flora in the Bible. The Flora encoded are not comprehensive, but is useful as-is, but should be considered a draft.
Word-level references, particularly within the Hebrew Bible, may also have omissions. The UBS Dictionary of the Hebrew Bible, which portions of the word-level analysis are based on, remains a work in progress, and not all word tokens of the Hebrew Bible have been analyzed. Also, the Macula analysis of the Hebrew Bible is not as developed as its Greek New Testament counterpart, and the referent data information can only be considered to be an initial draft.
This documentation represents the current (as of 2024-06-20) schema and is based on the Python dataclasses used while processing the place-specific data. We will do our best to keep this up to date, but there may be discrepancies.
| property | type | description |
| id | string | a string representing the unique identifier of this group (e.g. `group:Pharisees`) |
| primary_id | string | a group that has multiple representations has a primary entry identified by this string. The primary entry is identified where `primary_id` == `id`. |
| alternate_sources | AlternateSources dataclass | a dataclass that allows each possible alternate source to provide some information |
| type | string | for flora, `flora` is the only valid type |
| ubsdbg | list | a list of domain.article (##.##) strings representing the UBSDBG annotation |
| ubsdbh | list | a list of strings representing the article identifier(s) from UBSDBH |
| localizations | dict[str, dict[str, list]] | an object for collecting strings and other structures by language for localization purposes. This is where `preferred_label`, `alternate_labels`, and `description` are collected. |
| referred_to_as | list | a list of `id` for other entities that are considered functionally equivalent |
| only_mentioned_in_apocrypha | bool | If `TRUE` this group is only mentioned in the apocryphal portions of the Bible (note: here "apocrypha" are the apocryphal books of the protestant edition of the NRSV with apocyrpha). |
| non_biblical | bool | If `TRUE` there is no mention whatever of this group in the Bible. |
| lemmas | dict[str, list] | The key is the language (`el`, `he`, or `arc`) with lemmas as values in the list. |
| key_references | list | A list of BCV8 style references, where eight digits encode the zero-padded book (two digits), chapter (three digits), and verse (three digits) of the reference: `BBCCCVVV`. Note these references reflect the versification of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament via the Copenhagen Alliance 'ORG' scheme. |
| references | list | A list of BCV8 style references, where eight digits encode the zero-padded book (two digits), chapter (three digits), and verse (three digits) of the reference: `BBCCCVVV`. Note these references reflect the versification of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament via the Copenhagen Alliance 'ORG' scheme. |
| explicit_instances | dict[str, list] | initial key is edition (SBLGNT, WLC), list is corpus-specific word references where a 13 digit string encodes the reference to the word part position: `[on]BBCCCVVVWWWP`. Note these references reflect the versification of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament via the Copenhagen Alliance 'ORG' scheme. |
| pronominal_referents | dict[str, list] | initial key is edition (SBLGNT, WLC), list is corpus-specific word references where a 13 digit string encodes the reference to the word part position: `[on]BBCCCVVVWWWP`. Note these references reflect the versification of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament via the Copenhagen Alliance 'ORG' scheme. |
| subject_referents | dict[str, list] | initial key is edition (SBLGNT, WLC), list is corpus-specific word references where a 13 digit string encodes the reference to the word part position: `[on]BBCCCVVVWWWP`. Note these references reflect the versification of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament via the Copenhagen Alliance 'ORG' scheme. |
| speeches | dict[str, list[dict[str, obj]]] | initial key is edition (SBLGNT, WLC), list is word-level information regarding reported speech the entity is responsible for. Each speech has a `quote_type` property (usually `Normal` but sometimes `Questioning` or other contextually important data) as well as `words`;a list of corpus-specific word references where a 13 digit string encodes the reference to the word part position: `[on]BBCCCVVVWWWP`. Note these references reflect the versification of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament via the Copenhagen Alliance 'ORG' scheme. |
| property | type | description |
| aquifer | list | A pipe-delimited string (id|name|resource) derived from aquifer.bible |
| obi | list | Information derived from openbible.info |
| ubsdbh | list | Information derived from the UBS Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew |
| ubsdbg | list | Information derived from the UBS Dictionary of New Testament Greek |
| ubsfauna | list | Pointer to relevant article in the UBS Thematic Lexicon: Fauna |
| ubsflora | list | Pointer to relevant article in the UBS Thematic Lexicon: Flora |
| ubsrealia | list | Pointer to relevant article in the UBS Thematic Lexicon: Realia |
| digital_atlas_roman_empire | list | Relevant URL and ID from the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire, extracted from OpenBible.info data |
| pleiades | list | Relevant URL and ID from the Pleiades Project, extracted from OpenBible.info data |
| tipnr | list | Relevant ID from Tyndale House's StepBible project, Translators Individualized Proper Names with all References (TIPNR), extracted from OpenBible.info data |
| wikidata | list | Relevant ID from wikidata, extracted from OpenBible.info data |
| wikipedia | list | Relevant ID from wikidata, extracted from OpenBible.info data |