[sword-devel] Proper Name Identifiers

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Throughout the history of OSIS development, and at most Bible tech
conferences I've attended, we've all discussed the need for a Proper
Name Identifier Registry of unambiguous IDs for referencing people and
places in the Bible.

For the past couple months Steve DeRose has been working to extract
every proper name from the Bible and disambiguate and define a unique
identifier for each.  Along the way he is also building a very basic set
of metadata for each entity (in the natural sense).

Use Cases:

A student is reading about the land of Seir and would like to see all
articles in her library that reference this place and would not like to
see any article about Seir the father of Ezer.

A student would like to do research on Judas the brother of Christ.

An author would like to write an article on the many Herods who ruled in
Palestine, including which was the father of who, and unambiguously
reference-tag each Herod throughout his article.

Steve is very close to completing his work.  An intern at Calvin College
will be proofing his labors and polishing it up over the summer.

I'm sure he's like to hear your feedback.

I am personally excited to finally have a set of identifiers we can use
to disambiguate entities in Scripture.  It would be so useful if we all
could agree to make this a common set of identifiers when we tag proper
names in Scripture and related materials.

What are your thoughts?

Troy