[osis-core] reviving OSIS progress

[Chris Little]

Happy New Year (& a belated Happy Christmas) to you all.

Now that we've confirmed that the mailing list works, and assuming most 
of you still have the same email addresses as you did two years ago....

Would anyone care to discuss reviving work on OSIS to address some of 
the errors & shortcomings in the standard/schema/docs? There's been a 
fair amount of discussion at OpenScriptures (http://openscriptures.org/ 
; forum: http://groups.google.com/group/open-scriptures) about perceived 
weaknesses in OSIS and the stagnation of the standard.

I think a portion of that criticism is quite valid and that we ought to, 
minimally, address the known errors. Further development would be 
terrific as well, provided there is the interest & will among us. (I'm 
interested & willing.)

I would really like to see an improvement in documentation & community 
support. The Manual makes a good primer, but it doesn't have the level 
of depth & wealth of examples found in the USFM docs 
(http://confluence.ubs-icap.org/display/USFM/Home), which I think we 
would do well to emulate. I'd love to see an element-by-element, 
attribute-by-attribute explanation in a collaborative environment like a 
Wiki. I think the loss of osis-user at whi.wts.edu as a discussion forum is 
also a big loss for OSIS, so I'd like to see a new public forum for 
discussion/help, be that a web forum, mailing list, or something else.

Anyway... I'm just hoping to get the ball moving again.

Best,
Chris