[sword-devel] Cross references

[Justus Piater]

Sword (I use it with BibleTime) is a great project, but one thing that
I miss badly is cross references in the style of many printed editions
(or am I missing something?).

Cross references, I think, should be implemented as a separate module,
independently of any particular Bible version/translation. Maybe the
lexicon module type is suitable, or perhaps one should create a new
module type for this.

I'd like, for example, to drag and drop a verse into a cross-ref
module window, which then displays a list of cross
references. Dragging/dropping a reference into a Bible window would
take me to the referenced passage. This would be especially useful if
there were Web-brower-style backward/forward buttons associated with
each window that allow me to navigate back and forth along my history
of visited passages.

The Thompson Chain References already do much of this, but only in one
direction (or am I missing something?): I can click/drag/drop from
withing TCR to take me to a Bible passage, but not the other way
(unless I cut/paste an exact word into the TCR selection box). In the
above terms, what's missing is a way to list all Thompson topics
associated with a given verse, independently of the Bible
version/translation.

This requires that a cross-ref module be indexed by reference. The
Thompson module should have such an index in addition to the existing
index by topic name.

Any comments to the above ideas?

Where do we get cross references from? I guess that the existing
references are not usable because (1) of copyright restrictions and
(2) they are not available in electronic form. (I hope I'm somewhat
wrong here.)

In that case, to gather a body of useful cross references, we could
set up a database where anyone could post suggested cross references
(with annotations/remarks), which could continuously be peer reviewed
and periodically be rolled up in an updated cross-ref module
release. 

If people differ strongly on what type of cross references they like,
one could release several such modules independently.

What do you think?

Justus

-- 
Justus H. Piater, Ph.D.         http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/~piater
Institut Montefiore, B28	Phone: +32-4-366-2279
Université de Liège, Belgium	Fax:   +32-4-366-2620