[sword-devel] Versification representation questions...

[jonathon]

On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 13:50, Chris Burrell wrote:

>Does anyone have any views as to the best way of storing the verse/passage reference?

Test out each approach using different versions/editions of
GreekEsther.   It probably will provide you with every  "worst case
scenario" you can imagine, and some that you never thought would be
possible.  Use the results of those tests to guide you in your full
scale implementation.

> 2- Storing the beginning and end of each section say as a group of sub references { (book, start_chapter, start_verse, end_chapter, end_verse)+ }. In this case a reference would be many of the previous definition. I can see how we could work it out here, but i can see also having to do lots of index range scans on our database

Providing  the specific resource also provides the versification
scheme that is used, this is going to be the simplest approach to
implement, and provide results that are consistent.

The Hmong Bible --- or at least the version I'm working on --- doesn't
have individual verse numbers.  Each paragraph is a verse range.
(Verifying the text, creating Interlinears and Concordances for it is
awkward, because my usual error trapping/correction tools were written
for individual verses, not verse ranges.)

> 3- Number each verse of the bible from 1 to 30000 or something like that, and then workout and store each verse that is included in the reference in a table somewhere in the database

The _major_ problem  with this approach is that if the resources
aren't hand checked, to ensure that each verse has the
appropriate/correct verse number,  passages that overlap won't, and
passages that do not overlap will overlap.  (This is what the Study
Note Component of e-Sword used to do.  Whenever somebody created notes
from a Bible  translation that didn't correlate exactly to the
specifications, their notes were in the wrong place.)

A secondary  problem  is what happens when your verse scheme doesn't
include verses that a specific translation does have?

The KJV Protestant Canon has 31,102 verses.
The verse numbering will go to roughly 45,000, if you include the
Anagignoskomena.

> 5- Numbering each verse, but keying the numbers by book, say Exodus verse 750, 751, 752, etc.

The issue here is keeping the versification schemes straight.
Granted, regardless of approach, it is an issue. With this approach,
you'd  need at least two lookup tables to correctly correlate verses
to each other. (One table is book, verse number.  The other table is
book, chapter, verse number.)

jonathon