For those of you who have ever been frustrated by differences in electronic markup standards for biblical texts—the result of many moles digging in separate directions­—there is finally a more elegant and integrated design underway.

TheOpen Scriptural Information Standard 1.0 is the joint effort of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Bible Society and is designed as a flexible and wide-ranging template for all those working with electronic text markup in biblical studies and publishing.

The system is designed with a modular approach so the user can learn gradually and build upon their previous knowledge in later releases of the standard.

For example, a user might learn how to use the <verse></verse> element in the first release to mark verses in a text. It could well be that a later release will allow the user to specify how that verse maps onto a completely different verse system.

An equally interesting feature is the plan to provide a translation mechanism for the encoding system. This means that a German-speaking scholar could see, for example, <buch> instead of <book>, while encoding a biblical text.

Those interested in contributing to the development of this elegant eagle’s view technical template should visit the Bible Technology web site (http://was.btinternet.com/bti/redirect.html?http://www.bibletechnologies.net) and register comments on the first release, OSIS 1.0.

Citation: , " Bible Technology Group Release OSIS 1.0," SBL Forum , n.p. [cited Jan 2005]. Online:http://sbl-site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleID=62