[osis-users] osisID vs. language

[DM Smith]

On Jan 10, 2012, at 6:07 AM, Markku Pihlaja wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> Some background info first (skip to "------" if you want to get straight to business!).
> 
> The current official Finnish translation of the Bible was published in 1992 - and the official digital source files also date back to that time. Now the time has come to update the source files to a modern version, and we've selected OSIS for the job.
> 
> The original source files included certain coding for headings, chapter and verse numbers etc., and I have now been doing a lot of complicated regexp replacements to convert them to OSIS.
> 
> On the way, I've come across quite a number of questions that don't get answered by the OSIS manual. I believe many of them are familiar to you as well, so I'll  be feeding them to you in the near future.
> 
> I've actually never used a mailing list like this before, so I'm not familiar with any etiquette or standard behaviour that might be required - please inform me if I'm doing something funny ;).

The only thing I care about is that replies don't included the email of any user in the reply text.

> 
> But let's finally get to business. I guess I should post one question at a time, with a descriptive message subject. So I'll stat with this, more to come:
> 
> ------
> 
> osisID vs. language
> 
> Should osisID's e.g. in <verse> tags always be formed from the English abbreviations of books?

Yes, but don't think of them as English abbreviations. They are meant to be opaque references that software can use They are not meant for people to see. Each book of the Bible has one and only one representation for its osisID name. They could just as easily been nonsense, Aa, Ab, Ac, Ad, ..., Az, Ba, Bb, ....

The same is true for the '.' in the reference. They aren't meant for end users to use/see.

Same is true for osisRef.

> And if that is the case, can I somehow include an additional attribute for the Finnish versions?

The sID/eID value can be pretty much anything, but has to be properly paired and used on milestoned versions of the container tag. This too is not meant for people but for software, however the rules regarding content are more relaxed.

> 
> That is: I'd like to tag my verse like this: 
> <verse sID="Luuk.13.10" osisID="Luuk.13.10" /> 
> ("Luuk." instead of "Luke")
> but that would probably make my file rather incompatible with any international software that uses OSIS files.

Exactly. Internationalized software will convert standardized osisIDs for book names into the locale of the end user.

> 
> On the other hand, our main target group are Finnish publishers, and having the osisID's solely in English would not be very good service for them.

How is that any different than the tag  and attribute names for OSIS elements?

In Him,
	DM