Bob Pritchett recently blogged about visual text formatting: one example is LiveInk. I’ve wondered for some time how we might improve reading now that we don’t really need to have one-fontsize-fits-all, linear textual arrangements (for example, sizing text by prominence).

Apropos of this, i’m reading Robin Williams’ Non-Designers Design Book (hat tip to Coding Horror), a good starting point for people who aren’t professional designers but still have to do some kind of design (pretty much all of us these days). Two of the basic principles are Alignment and Proximity: elements that are close or aligned will seem related (whether they really are or not!).

Back to LiveInk: here’s one of their demo examples.

While breaking the sentence up definitely makes it more scannable, i have some trouble parsing the result, and i think Williams’ principle of Alignment helps explain it. For example, the alignment of “means” and “among adults” makes me think they’re somehow related. But they’re not: “among adults” modifies “physical activity”, and the linguist in me thinks it ought to therefore be moved farther to the right. Of course, you can only push right so far before running out of room, and maybe that’s the practical explanation for the alignment here (LiveInk’s site suggests they have solid research behind what they do).

(Post 2 in a series on building the Bible Knowledgebase, unfortunately delayed by a plague of web hosting problems)

The What: BK (Bible Knowledgebase) is reference information about the world of the Bible using Semantic Web standards and tools. The Semantic Web refers to moving from a world of networked pages displayed for humans (HTML, the vast majority of the current World Wide Web), to semantically-characterized information that is machine-readable (and therefore supports a variety of uses like search, browsing, visualization, etc.). Tim Berners-Lee likes to describe it as moving from a web of documents (meant to be read by humans) to a web of data (meant to be read by computers).

Initially, the scope is every named thing in the Bible (people and places are the bulk of the cases, but there are also languages, ethic groups, holidays, and numerous others). Eventually i hope to extend this to unnamed but described entities: for example, the Samaritan woman of John 4 is never named, but we know her ethnicity, where she lived, some people she interacted with, and other facts.

The Why: the Bible Knowledgebase will support

• Knowledge exploration and discovery: just as hyperlinked web pages lead you to new information, linked facts about individuals will lead to other individuals or resources about them.
• Smart (semantic) indexing: for a given passage, you’ll know which John/Mary/James is referred to, not just the collection of individuals who share that name. Searching will provide more precisely targeted results, because reference material will be disambiguated.
• Visualization: rich data sets support graphic displays that given an overview of information that would otherwise be scattered across numerous different passages

The How:

• I’ve designed an OWL ontology that captures an initial set of entity types and relationships between them
• Information from Logos’ Biblical People feature and New Testament Names has been merged into the initial dataset
• Both the ontology and the instance data will be extended to incorporate additional information. There’s no principled stopping point, but i expect to grow BK from its current size of ~100k RDF triples to perhaps 100-1000 times that size.

In the (perhaps unlikely) event that you’re in the intersection between

• Blogos readers, and
• attendees at the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose next week

i’ll be giving a presentation about this work Thursday morning.