Stephen Smith presented at BibleTech this last weekend about "The Need for a
Universal Bible Annotation Format." Stephen, previously employed by Crossway
as the developer for the ESV Online, is now employed at Zondervan and is
working to bring the same openness he built into ESV Online to be taken to a
larger scale at Bible Gateway, currently the most popular Bible website.
Stephen is also the voice behind OpenBible.info where he, obviously,
promotes openness of scriptural data.

Now regarding "The Need for a Universal Bible Annotation Format": Stephen
describes a format that would enable not only the portability of users' data
around the Web and among their devices, but it would also allow web apps to
integrate scriptural data from across the Web, making possible new
applications powered by this data. His talk examines the requirements for
such a system and it outlines possible ways to implement it. He announced
that this Open Scriptures Google Group would be where collaboration on such
standardization would take place. We can use the work he put into his talk
as the foundation for this new collaborative effort. Stephen's talk along
with his presentation slides will soon be posted at
http://bibletechconference.com/speakers.htm#StephenSmith-2009

The two main needs are:

   1. A way for scripture references to be marked up consistently, that is,
   standardizing how "Mark 10:45" and "Matthew 2-5" are made into hyperlinks;
   this is building upon OSIS and Sean Boisen's work on BibleRef.
   2. An XML vocabulary for marking up user annotations (incorporating the
   standardized scripture references above) so that they can be shared (and
   synchronized) between websites and devices.

Separate threads will be started in this group to address both topics.