BibleTech 2009 Topic: the Bible Knowledgebase

My most significant activity at Logos over the last year and a half has been building a database of people, places, and things i call the Bible Knowledgebase (BK). I’ve posted on numerous aspects of this project before (collected in this category), and thanks to lots of hard work by a number of individuals, we’re closing in on a relatively complete internal version. This won’t be released until the next major version of Logos software, so it’s public debut is still some ways off.

So one strong candidate for a BibleTech talk is a review of the BK, a machine-readable knowledge base of semantically-organized Bible data that is linked to Biblical texts to support search, navigation, visualization. The thousands of entities in the BK (people, places, and things, along with their names) have a variety of attributes that are appropriate to their type: people have family relationships, places have geo-coordinates, etc. Relationships between entities support discovery and exploration.
Unlike knowledge expressed in prose (like Bible dictionaries), BK data provides reusable content that can serve a variety of purposes. It also provides an important integration framework for Libronix resources, in the general spirit of Tim Berners-Lee’s Linked Data idea.

Some other topics the talk might address:

  • visualizing and learning from the graph of relationships
  • BK as an information architecture for other Libronix resources
  • challenges in building and using BK
  • some specific tools that have proved useful in managing BK development
  • a possible future for community participation in BK extension

So now, the audience participation portion of our program:

  • would you be interested in hearing a talk like this at BibleTech 2009?
  • what aspects are most/least interesting to you?

I’d encourage you to post a comment with your responses.