[sword-devel] importing TEI documents

[Gour]

Chris Little (chrislit@crosswire.org) wrote:

Hello Chris,

> I see Patrick already got most of your questions answered on osis-user in 
> a way that should be more helpful than most of us on this list can hope to 
> be.  I just have a couple of small notes to add in response to this 
> message:

Yes, Patrick was very kind indeed.

> Sword's OSIS importers are not necessarily going to work well.  They 
> might, they might not.  Part of the reason for that is that we're still 
> working to improve them at the same time as OSIS defines best practices.  
> Another part of the reason is that OSIS is currently in flux, moving 
> toward 2.0, as Patrick mentioned.  So things that work today for OSIS 1.5 
> won't necessarily work perfectly for OSIS 2.0. 

I fully understand the point. Everything in the material existence is in a
constant flux, especially in the open-source project :-)

> However, if you have a valid document that doesn't work, we would be happy to
> take a look at it and try to incorporate necessary changes into our importer.

Thank you for offering your assistance. At the moment I'm not having any 
document since I'm still in the phase of looking about the proper framework.

TEI markup is pretty stable and maybe more appropriate for my needs, but your
Sword library is really tempting :-)

However, it looks like Sword & OSIS are primarily focused on Bible and related
scriptures, while I'm interested for a broader scope of documents (probably
encoded in TEI and even some other markup ) and providing free-text retrieval
for them, with the possibility to publish & distribute everything on a CD
media.

There were recently some discussion on TEI list regards - which tool to used
for text retrieval. But I don't like so much Java tools like Lucene ..

It would be ideally to have Sword-like engine with importer for OSIS, TEI,
DocBook and then Bibletime-like front-ends to incorporate everything and have
on disposal for free-text retrieval.

Something like Folio Infobase, askSam ...but open-source, and according to some
XML standard(s). Sword project already provides much of that functionality.

Do you have some estimation what is the maximum size of the modules (in MBs)
which can be effectively handled by Sword (everything included)?

> Secondly, since you mention using the manual, I'll point out that it is 
> very definitely a draft.  It's full of typos and details that were correct 
> for earlier versions of OSIS (in some cases, possibly versions that 
> changed before even being released to the public).  But there is light on 
> the horizon as Steve & Patrick are actively working to revise the manual 
> and it should be a terrific resource for 2.0 encoding.

Yes, I'm eager to see what will V2.0 bring out and how it can suit me.

Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
Gour
gour@mail.inet.hr
Registered Linux User #278493