[sword-devel] Making better use of the CrossWire GitHub project ?
Michael Johnson
kahunapule at eBible.org
Sun Feb 18 16:19:27 EST 2024
Thank you, Michael, for the pointer to Jonathan Robie's paper on
Scriptural markup in the Bible translation community. I think it
diplomatically states why USX won out over OSIS as the primary and
best-supported XML standard for representing Scripture.
I really don't expect USFM or USX to go away any time soon, nor do I
expect OSIS to gain significant traction where it is not in use already.
I think it is safe to say that Crosswire is the group that cares most
about OSIS. In many ways, the USX vs. OSIS competition is like the old
VHS vs. BetaMax video tape competition. (Remember way back when video
tapes were actually used?) BetaMax was technically superior in many
ways, but VHS won because of (1) greater support by content providers,
(2) slightly lower cost of implementation, and (3) incompatibility
between the formats (i.e. no machine could read both formats).
I honestly think that fully supporting USX would be a better use of
limited resources than tweaking OSIS to overcome its current defects.
For those that don't know, USX is an XML representation of USFM.
USX is well documented and actively maintained at
https://ubsicap.github.io/usx/. OSIS is abandoned by almost everyone by
Crosswire. Backup copies of the Schema or on crosswire.org and
eBible.org, but there is currently no official pumpkin holder to
maintain it.
USX is fully automatically convertable to and from USFM with no loss or
human intervention needed. This is not true of pure OSIS for technical
and philosophical reasons. This is probably the biggest reason that OSIS
was never supported natively in Paratext, and most likely never will be.
USX is the native format of the Every Tribe Every Nation Digital Bible
Library, which is the highest-quality and best-supported repository of
Bible translations in the world.
USX and/or USFM are supported by all of the best Bible translation
software, including open source options. OSIS has no Bible translation
software support.
USX and/or USFM are supported by numerous Bible publishing options, both
digitally and for print. OSIS has no significant Bible publishing
support outside of Crosswire.
USX has organizational support from the most influential Bible
translation agencies.
Using USX and/or USFM makes versification mapping easier, because
someone else has already done the work.
There are currently at least 2 reasonable ways to convert from USFM or
USX to OSIS with minimal losses in formatting. Neither one is perfect,
but maybe good enough. There is a lot of code assuming OSIS inputs to
Sword modules, and that could remain, along with GBF and TEI, but I can
see better quality coming from direct USX support.
If OSIS is good enough as is, fine. But if it isn't, then I suggest that
it be phased out rather than modified.
On 2/18/24 09:42, Michael H wrote:
> Re: Lack of momentum for OSIS.
>
> OSIS as described on wikipedia is owned by a committee including
> United Bible Societies, SIL International, and the Society of Biblical
> Literature.
>
> However, this team got together and created the version that is
> available, then almost completely ignored it, and went back to the SFM
> tagging system and then produced USFM, when turned into several more
> closely related XML languages, but has become USX. There was in the
> UBS/SIL Paratext translation program the ability to produce OSIS
> output until version 8, but since about 2016, there is no use or
> mention of OSIS in Paratext.
>
> A history and analysis of why this is published in Balisage 2021
> conference:
>
> https://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol26/html/Robie01/BalisageVol26-Robie01.html
>
> Even in 2024, the tagging language USFM remains the "primary" tool to
> encode biblical works at almost all the organizations that produced
> OSIS. There is no momentum for that committee to ever meet again. But
> the spec has holes.
>
> https://gitlab.com/cmahte/osis-users-manual-2.1
>
> I started working on updating OSIS, and in the process received a
> reply from someone at ABS or UBS that although the OSIS spec is
> copyrighted and does not contain specific verbiage about reuse, I
> could and should consider it licensed under creative commons BY-SA.
> (At the time, I wasn't seeking to update OSIS, but freely copy from it
> in creating a successor or fork.)
>
> This means that OSIS is both abandoned and available for adoption by a
> successor body. I've also since moved on from ever producing proposed
> changes to it or a fork myself. IF I ever got far enough along to need
> a formal spec, it would be extensions USFM or to OpenDocument or more
> directly synonymous with that XML. If you're interested, I'll dig up
> the contact information, and pass it along. But I do have a copy
> re-edited into USFM (or more specifically a draft version of PSFM...
> which means the way tables are built in my text are unusual.) If there
> is an effort to update. I can transform my work into LibreOffice
> Writer format.
>
> I suggest it is time to consider an OSIS 3, or at least an OSIS 2.2
> spec that is owned by a successor organization instead of
> organizations that effectively abandoned it. That's the missing link
> which would provide a mechanism to actually make changes to the
> standard. People (including me) keep doing this search and landing at
> Crosswire Bible society as the best option for a new owner. But maybe
> who OWNS can be one of the topics considered by a committee.
>
> On Sat, Feb 17, 2024 at 9:47 AM Arnaud Vié <unas.zole+avie at gmail.com
> <mailto:unas.zole%2Bavie at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> Having dived into the whole crosswire ecosystem recently, I'm at
> the same time impressed at the quality of the tools provided (in
> particular the OSIS standard and the JSword lib, as I've been
> working in Java), and worried by what I perceive as a lack of
> dynamism around it's development and difficulty to contribute.
>
> By "lack of dynamism" I of course don't mean to criticise the time
> anyone spends (as we contribute to a free ecosystem, we all have
> lives keeping us busy elsewhere), but rather to highlight how
> rough it is for external enthusiastic people to join.
> For example, I'd like to contribute evolutions to the OSIS
> standard around versification systems, but I have no idea where to
> make such proposals, as there is only a mailing list dead since
> 2015 <http://crosswire.org/pipermail/osis-core/>, a few wiki pages
> <https://wiki.crosswire.org/Category:OSIS> and a few downloadable
> documents <https://crosswire.org/osis/> which are supposedly the
> latest version.
>
> I think a lot of that could be improved by making better use of
> the crosswire github project <https://github.com/crosswire>, which
> is nowadays the first contact most young developers will have with
> these crosswire projects.
>
> I'd like to propose a few changes, get your opinions, and
> volunteer to execute them if everyone agrees.
>
> * *Revive the jsword github repository*.
> That includes
> o Backporting the relevant changes from the andbible fork
> <https://github.com/AndBible/jsword/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed>
> (excluding android-specific stuff - which I already mostly
> removed in my last PR there).
> o Setting up a release process to publish the jar on a maven
> repository.
> o Setting up a clear branching model and writing clear
> contribution guidelines.
> o Having a team of several people familiar with Java
> development to review PRs or answer questions in the issue
> tracker. I obviously volunteer, but more people is always
> the best.
>
> * *Create a new Git repository for the OSIS specification*.
> Must contain :
> o In Git, the OSIS XSD schema, and the functional
> specification (basically, the contents of the current
> manual) in markdown or asciidoc format.
> So that contributions to the standard may be opened as
> pull requests, reviewed, potentially stored as separate
> branches, etc.
> o A wiki tab where all relevant OSIS-related resources from
> the crosswire wiki should be copied.
>
> * Ideally, I'd also suggest *moving the C++ sword code to github*.
> Having it only on an old SVN repo
> <https://crosswire.org/svn/sword/trunk/>, not browsable or
> searchable online, really harms its visibility. I used a
> little bit of SVN while in engineering school 12 years ago,
> but I doubt that most young devs nowadays even know about it.
>
> But for this last C++ part, I suspect it has bigger impact on
> current developers, since Troy is still actively developing it and
> using the Jira bugtracker for this part - so there is no urgent
> need to change.
> I'm really more worried about the jsword repo (it breaks my heart
> to see it dead since 2019) and having a visible and versioned
> location for the OSIS standard.
>
> Please let me know your thoughts !
> And whoever is currently admin of the github project, would you be
> willing to grant me some permissions on the jsword repo and a new
> "osis-spec" repo to start setting up all of this ?
>
> Regards,
>
> Arnaud Vié
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