Written by: Mobile Ministry Magazine

Beginning the recaps of the time at the 2010 BibleTech Conference, I’d like to start with talking some about the first presentation: Mobile in the Next 10yrs (The Churchy Version).

One of the reasons for doing this presentation was to set some of the (needed) perspective to what is clearly in the mind and code snippets of many in the software and publishing industries. This year, there was a lot of talk about mobile (and the iPad) and what it has meant as there’s clearly a change in what’s possible when not just data is available, but it needs to be constructed to fit contextual situations as well.

For MMM’s presentation, these were these five speaking points:

• Mobile will be the primary avenue for telling the church’s story over the next 10yrs
• Mobile increases the church’s need to have cross-functional knowledge of culture and context
• Censorship and copyright will drive mobile sharing of religious texts to innovative solutions
• Mobile will be vilified and affirmed by traditionally-minded church and lay leaders
• Education + genuine faith + mobile = education and community redefined (Africa, SE Asia, and Global South)

Aside from a technical glitch (red and yellow are different colors, doh), I believe that it set the stage very well towards what will be better understood not just in respect to Bible software and studies, but how the Body responds to the context of people who get, learn, and assume that information is a commodity.

The last two bullets are better understood in the context of the change of generations and economics. Those who are leaders in spirit and business within the Body need to not just understand these changes, but also (in some cases) adapt to the reality that language, innovation, education, and even enterprise will not start with the former leaders, but those who learned from previous generations/leaders.

The hope was that presentation would set the ground also for the second – and main – presentation. As this was demo night, there was only 10 minutes to present what MMM knows best (Proverbs 4:7-8). I only wish that I had not rushed it – demonstrating any kind of knowledge needs to keep room open for conversation – of which there was a lot of at BibleTech. You can bet that I learned a quick lesson that night, and at the same time gained some insight towards what some in the Body are looking towards mobile for. Suffice to say, there’s a lot out there, and excitement of all kinds.

Stay tuned for part two of the MMM BibleTech Recap where some of these meetings and conversations will be talked about. And after that, we’ll talk about the main presentation, and some of the changes that it will cause for MMM.

View the presentation: The 5 Areas Where Mobile and the Church Intersect/Mobile in the Next 10 Years (The Churchy Version)

There’s some additional conversation about these points over at the Visual Story Network’s Mobile Ministry forums.

This post originally appeared on Mobile Ministry Magazine

Written by: Sean Boisen

Last week Logos announced a public API for their new website, Biblia.com, at BibleTech. Of course, i want to wave the flag for my employer. But i’m also interested as somebody who’s dabbled in Bible web services in the past, most notably the excellent ESV Bible web service (many aspects of which are mirrored in the Biblia API: some previous posts around this can be found here at Blogos in the Web Services category). Dabblers like me often face a perennial problem: the translations people most want to read are typically not the most accessible via API, or have various other limitations.

So i’m happy with the other announcement from BibleTech last week: Logos is making the Lexham English Bible available under very generous terms (details here). The LEB is in the family of “essentially literal” translations, which makes it a good choice for tasks where the precise wording matters. And the LEB is available through the API (unlike most other versions you’re likely to want, at least until we resolve some other licensing issues).

I don’t want to do a review of the entire API here (and it will probably continue to evolve). But here are a couple of things about it that excite me:

• The most obvious one is the ability to retrieve Bible text given a reference (the content service). Of the currently available Bible versions, the LEB is the one that interests me the most here (i hope we’ll have others in the future).
• Another exciting aspect for me is the tag service. You provide text which may include Bible references: the service identifies any references embedded in it, and then inserts hyperlinks for them to enrich the text. So this is like RefTagger on demand (not just embedded in your website template). You can also supply a URL and tag the text that’s retrieved from it. One caveat with this latter functionality: if you want to run this on HTML, you should plan to do some pre-processing first, rather than treating it all as one big string. Otherwise random things (like “XHTML 1.0″ in a DOCTYPE declaration) wind up getting tagged in strange ways (like ML 1.0).

I’ve just started working through the Biblia API today, but since i’m a Pythonista, developing a Python interface seemed like the way to go. This is still very much a work in progress, but you can download the code from this zip file and give it a whirl. Caveats abound:

• I’ve only implemented three of the services so far: content() (retrieves Bible content for a reference), find() (lists available Bibles and metadata), and tag() (finds references in  text and enhances it with hyperlinks). And even with these three services, i haven’t supported all the parameters (maybe i will, maybe i won’t).
• This is my first stab at creating a Python interface to an API, so there may be many stylistic shortcomings.
• Testing has also gotten very little attention, and bugs doubtless remain.

If you’re interested and want to play along, let me know: we can probably set up a Google group or something for those who want to improve this code further.

This post originally appeared on Blogos

Written by: Mobile Ministry Magazine

Just wanted to post a quick update on the Maemo/MeeGo open source Bible reader named Katana. At this point, its in an early alpha phase and is getting still some of the core functionality within it.

Right now, Katana supports the ability to use Bible modules from Sword (user needs to already have them installed on their device), uses the volume control buttons to page up/down, and the initiation of the search feature by simply sliding open the keyboard and beginning to type. Navigating to another Bible is done in the same way search is.

The next features include the ability to download texts from the web (Sword-only, I have put in a request to use Logos’ Biblia API which was announced at BibleTech).

You can follow updates towards the development of Katana by following this thread at Talk.Maemo. The project is in need of more (Qt) developers, testers, and any other Bible software companies who are utilizing web services to serve their Biblical content.

As a note: one of the features planned for Katana is to allow users the ability to download a module which would enable the use of a publishers/software service’s APIs in a manner that keeps licenses and ethics intact. Consider using Katana as a test bed for this method of delivering your content and encourage a strong open source development community in the process. There’s a lot of good that can come to publishers and developers who contribute to this effort, its essentially changing the way users get and use Bible software.

Very important note: to download and use Katana, you would need to enable the extras-devel repository. This repository is for very alpha software and may cause unintended effects to other applications or your device as a whole. The use of the repository is for the testing of applications before they enter the testing repository and undergo more formal testing. Use Katana and this repository at your own risks.

This post originally appeared on Mobile Ministry Magazine

Written by: Sean Boisen

If you’re thinking through the events of Holy Week, let me know what you think about this visualization that i created last year (but apparently failed to tie into the SemanticBible navigation, so you might not easily find it otherwise).  Here’s my previous Blogos post on this. I’m really interested in presentations like this that enable browsing by content rather than having to know the reference in advance.

To recap some of the features:

• Colored blocks are grouped together by pericope so the presentation is organized by the events, rather than the order of texts themselves. The size of the block indicates how many words are associated with the pericope, and the colors indicate which Gospel provided the material. This helps you immediately see things like the fact that all four Gospels provide quite a bit of detail about the triumphal entry, though only Luke includes Jesus’ sorrow over Jerusalem.
• The blocks are grouped by day, through the chronology is uncertain in several places, so this is an approximation at best.
• Clicking on the pericope title takes you to the Composite Gospel page (though apparently some of the indexes are off). Clicking on the colored block takes you to source text at bible.logos.com (and a tooltip indicates the reference). As i recall, i couldn’t figure out a way to use RefTagger to actually display the text more directly in a popup.

This post originally appeared on Blogos

Written by: Sean Boisen

If you’re thinking through the events of Holy Week, let me know what you think about this visualization that i created last year (but apparently failed to tie into the SemanticBible navigation, so you might not easily find it otherwise).  Here’s my previous Blogos post on this. I’m really interested in presentations like this that enable browsing by content rather than having to know the reference in advance.

To recap some of the features:

• Colored blocks are grouped together by pericope so the presentation is organized by the events, rather than the order of texts themselves. The size of the block indicates how many words are associated with the pericope, and the colors indicate which Gospel provided the material. This helps you immediately see things like the fact that all four Gospels provide quite a bit of detail about the triumphal entry, though only Luke includes Jesus’ sorrow over Jerusalem.
• The blocks are grouped by day, through the chronology is uncertain in several places, so this is an approximation at best.
• Clicking on the pericope title takes you to the Composite Gospel page (though apparently some of the indexes are off). Clicking on the colored block takes you to source text at bible.logos.com (and a tooltip indicates the reference). As i recall, i couldn’t figure out a way to use RefTagger to actually display the text more directly in a popup.

This post originally appeared on Blogos

Written by: Sean Boisen

The BibleTech conference is an annual highlight for those of us who work at the intersection of Bible stuff and technology, and last week’s meeting in San Jose was no exception. This was the third BibleTech — i’ve been fortunate to have attended (and presented at) them all — and there’s always a great mix of new ideas, updates on ongoing projects, and lots of interesting people to talk to. (some other reviews: Rick Brannan, Mike Aubrey, Trey Gourley)

Some of the talks i liked best this year:

• I was already interested in Pinax before hearing James Tauber’s talk on Using Django and Pinax for Collaborative Linguistics: now i’m itching to get started!
• Stephen Smith had a nice analysis of the most frequently tweeted Bible passages (though the evidence of vast swaths of Scripture that get very little attention was perhaps a bit depressing).
• Neil Rees showed Concordance Builder, a program that lets you use a Swahili concordance to bootstrap one for Welsh (or any other pair of languages) with no linguistic knowledge. Building on the Paratext tool, it leverages the verse indexes along with approximate string matching and statistical glossing (technical paper by J D Riding) to produce results that are about 90-95% correct out of the book. This can reduce concordance development to a matter of weeks rather than years.
• There were several talks related to semantics in addition to mine: Randall Tan talked about more automated methods and fleshed them out relative to the higher-level structure of Galatians, and Andi Wu gave what looked like a really interesting presentation on semantic search based on syntax and cross-language correspondence (alas, i missed it).
• Weston Ruter talked about APIs they’re developing at OpenScriptures.org (and brought in the Linked Data idea). Logos also unveiled their new API for Biblia.

I felt my talks went well and i got some good feedback. My slides are now posted (if you wrote down URLs at the conference, i didn’t get them quite right but here they’re correct):

• Annotating Linguistic Reference in the New Testament (http://www.semanticbible.com/other/talks/2010/BibleTech-NTReferents/BibleTech-NTReferents.html)
• A Controlled Vocabulary for Biblical Studies (http://www.semanticbible.com/other/talks/2010/BibleTech-LCV/BibleTech-LCV.html) — this is what we internally call the Logos Controlled Vocabulary (LCV).

(As with some previous talks, i did my presentation with Slidy (previous post): i feel like it’s going a little more smoothly each time.)

This post originally appeared on Blogos

Written by: Mobile Ministry Magazine

Woah, didn’t know that this was posted. Here’s the presentation that I did last September at the Visual Story Network’s Leadership Conference (The 4th Screen Reinvents the 1st Chance). As of this writing, I’ve not seen the video, but yea, am digging the person who’s giving it.

Check it out via Vimeo and VSN.

This post originally appeared on Mobile Ministry Magazine

Written by: Dony & Kathryn Donev

Pictures made on Nokia 5800XM courtesy of the Mobile Ministry Magazine

Traveling Schedule | Follow us on Twitter | Ministry Website | The Volvo

Written by: Dony & Kathryn Donev

Pictures made on Nokia 5800XM courtesy of the Mobile Ministry Magazine

Traveling Schedule | Follow us on Twitter | Ministry Website | The Volvo

Written by: Dony & Kathryn Donev

Volvo’s brakes began making strange noises as soon as we departed from San Francisco after the BibleTech conference.

By the time we crossed Death Valley and reached Las Vegas for our Palm Sunday service with the Bulgarian Church there, the metal brackets were grinding on the rotor disk, but we had only a day for the services and no time to bother with mechanical problems.

So, we left for Texas after the service crossing Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico.

By the time we reached Amarillo, TX there was barely any metal left on the rotors. The friendly folks at Firestone in Amarillo changed the brake pads in less than an hour. What a pit stop!

Unfortunately, they could not find rotors for the Volvo in the area, so we departed for Houston and with the Easter service next day. We drove those 600 miles as careful as we could.

The morning before the service, we left the Volvo at Just Brakes and headed to service. And while we were ministering to the Bulgarian people in Houston, the Volvo was also resurrected in the pit stop for a new life on the road with new rear brakes and rotor disks.

And thus, we were able to continue our journey through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama reaching our next ministry location in the great Atlanta area. Special thanks to Firestone in Amarillo, TX and Just Brakes in Pearland, TX for the prompt and friendly service.

Pictures made on Nokia 5800XM courtesy of the Mobile Ministry Magazine

Traveling Schedule | Follow us on Twitter | Ministry Website | The Volvo