[sword-devel] Use Cases / 1.7.x development

[Daniel Owens]

Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
> Guys,
>
> Last week was a great time in New Orleans at SBL.  Many good
> relationships were forged or rekindled and hope some exciting things
> will come from the time spent there.
>
> There was one session that I think gives us something against which to
> measure ourselves (not that it's my personal goal to compete with
> commercial vendors, but nonetheless these are good benchmarks).
>
> In the Computer Technology Track there was a 1 hour session call Bible
> Technology Shootout where Logos, Bibleworks, Accordance, and Olive Tree
> were given the floor to show how their software solved 5 common Bible
> research problems.
>
> It might be fun to see how each of your frontends can answer these
> challenges, and where we need to provide better support in the engine to
> give you the results you need to offer this functionality to your end
> user.
>
>   
Snip...
> So, here are the challenges presented to the vendors at that session:
>
> 1) Give the parsing of a word and its meaning from a standard
> source.)
>
>   
This is very exciting to me. I just want to reiterate that the look-up 
for lemma needs to work when the key is an actual lemma and not a 
Strong's number. For unicode keys the current sorting scheme doesn't 
work. I would say this first item should be a priority. What a user 
wants first is the ability to look up words quickly in order to 
read/translate. Only once that function is present do the following more 
advanced features make sense.

The other day I was talking with a fellow PhD student whose work is in 
patristics. She has to take a NT class next semester, so she wanted to 
buy her first Bible software product. I so much wanted to recommend one 
of the CrossWire front-ends, but I couldn't because of this feature. 
Part of that story is that a standard lexicon (Strong's is out of date) 
needs to be offered to be attractive to scholars, but to make use of 
standard lexica the front-ends need to be able to handle unicode keys 
better.

In any case, I am excited to see where this conversation might go. Any 
progress on obtaining permission to create a module with the Westminster 
morphology database?

Daniel