Category: Logos

What’s New in Logos 6

Logos 6 LaunchFaithlife Corporation (formerly known as Logos Bible Software) announced the release of Logos 6 today, the newest version of our flagship product for Bible study. As my colleague Rick Brannan put it in his blog post, “here’s how I’ve spent the last two years”: building the best version ever of this amazing product. So I’m dusting off my blog to talk about what makes Logos 6 so great.

There’s so much to talk about! I plan to create a separate post for each of several new features so they have their own focus.

But to whet your appetite for more, here are a couple of videos that overview some of the new features (and include me and several of my colleagues) from our YouTube channel:

There’s a whole collection here of brief videos on new features and datasets.

 

BibleTech talk: Automatically Learning Topical Content

I’ve posted the slides from my BibleTech 2013 talk. Here’s the abstract:

Continued work on the Logos Controlled Vocabulary (BibleTech 2010, “A Controlled Vocabulary for Biblical Studies”) has produced a unique collection of topic-aligned content across more than 50 different Bible dictionaries, encyclopedias, and topical indexes in both English and Spanish. This presentation will describe the information we’re learning automatically from this content, including:

  • determining concept importance
  • associating concepts with Bible references
  • extracting and associating names and descriptive terms for concepts
  • relating concepts to each other

You can see the other talks at the BibleTech website. I’ve had a number of positive comments on the talk, which is always gratifying. Slowly but surely, we’re climbing up the data stack …

3/21/2013 update: I’ve used the Slidy framework for presentations for several years because i like the way it puts the whole content out on the web in HTML. However, @JohnRGentry pointed out that my slides don’t work on the iPad because moving forward and backward requires keys. There’s a newer version of Slidy which does support swiping to move through slides, though my experience with it on both Safari and Chrome on iOS hasn’t been great: it’s not easy to register a swipe, and title text sometimes gets lost. I assume these are issues with javascript support on iOS, though i’m not really sure. I’ll try to update my slides to the newest version of Slidy, which will help a little, but i’ll also look for another framework that’s more tablet friendly.

Logos 5, Behind the Curtain: Curation

This post is part of Logos 5, Behind the Curtain, a series of blog posts looking at new data sets that are part of the latest Bible study application from Logos Bible Software.

At the heart of Logos’ approach to data is the practice of curation. If you’ve heard this term at all, it’s probably in the context of museums: but we mean something rather different. As usual, Scott Adams’ Dilbert has the pulse of corporate America:

The Official Dilbert Website featuring Scott Adams Dilbert strips, animations and more

For Logos, though, curation is not just trendy new jargon, but an essential practice that we’ve been pursing for quite a few years now (five under my direction, and more before my tenure). It’s a critical part of what makes Logos unique in its market. For example, we have not one but three Lexical Curators working on the Bible Sense Lexicon (one for Greek, two for Hebrew). To my knowledge (and Google’s), these appear to be the only people in the world with this job title. In fact, most people in the Content Innovation department at Logos are doing one kind of curation task or another.

So what is curation in the context of Bible study software, anyway? In the simplest terms, curation means organizing and maintaining a collection of things. In the museum context, that’s artifacts they display. Our kind of curation involves computer-readable data that captures knowledge relevant to biblical studies. You can summarize it briefly with three key practices:

  1. Collect
  2. Correct
  3. Connect

(“Describe” is probably a more apt term than “Correct”, but i just couldn’t resist the awesome alliteration.)

To “Collect” means imposing organization on a complicated and messy world of information, with an eye toward structuring it and making it useful in some way in the Logos system. Often this information is expressed in prose sentences in a reference book: for example, a Bible dictionary might describe a city, and include language about where the city was located, what larger region it was part of, where it’s mentioned in the Bible, etc. Fundamentally, a plan for collection requires deciding what information ought to be collected, and which things belong in the collection and which ones are excluded (in more technical terms, an ontology).

Capturing and formalizing knowledge typically involves some tradeoffs. First of all, we have to find categories and labels that balance and maximize utility and (formal) correctness. When it comes to categorization in particular, ultimately “everything is miscellaneous” (which is also the title of a really important book by David Weinberger), and if you push hard enough, each thing is its own unique category . But data sets are typically more useful if things are grouped in some way. So we categorize the following as “people” in our data set:

  • individuals (whether named or not)
  • groups, whether defined by residence (Greeks), common ancestry (Levites), belief systems (Pharisees and Sadducees) , etc.
  • supernatural entities (including those that most Bible readers would accept like the God of Israel, and those that biblical authors argue are not real at all, like Baal, Asherah, or Zeus)

To “Correct” or “Describe” means that we choose and populate particular attributes for the items we’re curating. In the case of people, that includes things like names, gender, and roles. In addition, we create three special attributes for nearly every data set:

  • a unique identifier: though you’ll probably know who i mean when i use a biblical name like “David”, you won’t for “John” because there are five different individuals known by that name. This kind of ambiguity, and other variations (“John”, “John the Baptist”, “John Baptizer”, etc.) means names are usually poor identifiers. Instead, we create a symbol like “John.4” that uniquely identifies one particular item in our collection (in this case, a member of the Sanhedrin mentioned in Acts 4:6). Since we don’t show these to users, we don’t have to worry about people understanding them.
  • a label: since our data is for people to look at and understand, we need user-friendly ways to display an entity. Labels are typically brief (less than 20 -25 characters), and also unique, so that in a drop-down list showing names that match “John”, i can distinguish “John (the Baptist)” from “John (Ac 4:6)”. Since the label is also unique, we could use it as the identifier: but since data stability is a primary goal, we separate the two, so that we can change the label if necessary. Since identifiers (not labels) are the means by which we connect data, we (almost) never change them, since that risks breaking the integrity of the data set.
  • a description: labels are brief so they take up minimum space, but consequently, they can’t carry much information. So we often provide a longer prose description, perhaps a sentence or two, that helps identify the entity and its most basic information. You could compare this to the leading sentence in a Wikipedia article. In the case of John.4, that’s “a member of the family of high priests in Jerusalem following Jesus’ ascension.”, which is probably enough to help you decide whether this is a John you want to know more about or not.

To “Connect” means linking entities to other entities (or other data sets). For people, family relationships are an important ways that people connect to each other. We also label those relationship (father, mother, sister), and, for biblical information, capture the textual sources that support this relationship (more technically, the provenance of the data).

Connecting information is one of the most important aspects of curation for Logos. While it may be interesting to learn that King David was also a shepherd, that’s an isolated fact. But if you can get a list of other individuals in the Bible who were also shepherds (or kings, or musicians), now you’re discovering new information. You might not have started out looking for this, or known how to find it for yourself.

Question: which part of Logos’ curation process (Collect, Correct, Connect) do you find the most interesting or appealing? Please leave me a comment.

(Edit: saw a good piece today by John Chambers of Cisco about the power of connection. http://www.wired.com/insights/2012/12/the-internet-of-everything/)

Logos 5, Behind the Curtain: Introduction

I’ve fallen off in my blogging quite a bit over the last few years: my last post (a book review) was December 2011, and, other than conference reports and book reviews, it’s rather sparse for the year or two prior to that.

But i’m excited to be reviving my blog and starting a new series today to celebrate the release of Logos 5. In Bob’s Pritchett’s overview post on the Logos blog, he talks about the importance of connection in Bible study, and says [italics mine]

Logos Bible Software 5 is a significant update that is all about connection.

This focus on connection is not just marketing talk or a conceptual metaphor. It describes in a very concrete way the important new datasets that make Logos 5 a major contribution to the world of biblical studies. I recognize that’s a mighty big claim, but i plan to back it up by describing the vision, architectures, effort, and technical approaches that have made the new features of Logos 5 a reality. In my role as Director of Content Innovation at Logos, i lead a talented and hard-working team of people who have spent the last several years making all these connections. (it wasn’t my idea, but that’s me in the “What’s new in Logos 5” video) Over this series of posts, i hope you’ll gain a better appreciation for what went into these new features, and what makes them so important.

I’d love to hear your comments and questions. For example: which of the new Logos 5 features do you find most useful?

Hyperlinks to Logos Resources

A few years back i blogged about links into Logos software as a kind of knowledge resource. This style of richly-hyperlinked information is increasingly becoming the standard way i try to communicate: it couples the basic textual content with doors that open into related areas.

With the release of Logos 4 (now a year ago!), there have been some significant changes both to how those links get expressed, and what kind of information can be linked to. So i recently wrote a post for the Logos Blog explaining how this works and why Logos users might care:  Logos 4 Information Has an Address. If you’re a Logos user, i encourage you to check it out!

A Python Interface for api.Biblia.com

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 <a href="http://ref.ly/Mal1">ML 1.0</a>).

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.

BibleTech:2010 Debrief

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):

(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.)

Bob’s Talk at TOC

I blogged a funny story last week about Logos CEO Bob Pritchett’s attendance at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) conference. But here’s a serious comment from Mark Coker of the Huffington Post that warrants quoting (italics are mine):

The Best Presentation at TOC

My favorite presentation of the conference was from Bob Pritchett of Logos Bible Software, in a session titled, Network Effects Support Premium Pricing. I remember attending his presentation four years ago at the first TOC in San Jose, so I knew I didn’t want to miss his presentation this time. They’re doing amazing stuff at Logos. They face an interesting challenge, one that every author and publisher faces: How do you compete against free? In their case, they sell about 10,000 bible study ebooks. How much has the bible changed over the last two hundred years? Not much. But what Logos excels at is making this information more accessible than ever before. They take a database-centric view of their vast and ever-growing library of content.

When you purchase a book from them, you’re not just getting a static ebook, you’re buying into a dynamic, integrated online application environment that becomes richer with each new publication, and with each new member to their community. Even if Bible study isn’t your thing, check them out for future-of-publishing inspiration. I can’t do them justice here.

High praise indeed from somebody who isn’t necessarily into Bible study, but recognizes that what Logos is doing is really quite unique in the entire publishing industry. Our “database-centric views” are only getting stronger, so you can expect to hear more about this in the months to come.

LCV Talk at Semantic Technology Conference

I’ll be giving a talk at the Semantic Technology Conference, June 23 from 7:30AM – 8:20am (ouch!), in San Francisco, CA. The talk title is “Using a Controlled Vocabulary for Managing a Digital Library Platform“: no talk page yet, but the abstract follows. If you’re there, come by and say hello!

(Astute readers will note some similarities between this and my upcoming BibleTech talk. But the audiences are quite different, so the content will be too. This talk will provide “a practical case study on semantically organizing reference material to support search and navigation, using a controlled vocabulary.”)

Abstract

Encyclopedias and other subject-oriented reference books frequently present the same content using different names: and users often look for this information using other names altogether.

The Logos Controlled Vocabulary (LCV) organizes parallel but distinct content in the domain of Biblical studies to integrate reference information and support search, discovery, and knowledge management. The LCV captures

  • preferred and alternate terminology
  • inter-term relationships
  • term hierarchy
  • linkage to other semantic information

The initial version of the LCV (now shipping in the Logos digital library platform) comprises some 11,000 terms, and continues to grow as more reference works are added. It also provides the backbone of http://topics.logos.com, a website for user contributions to terminology and content.

This talk will describe the building of the LCV, how we’re using it now, and how we plan to use and extend it in the future.

Keywords: , , , ,

Building an Architecture of Participation in Bible Study

The Cornucopia of the Commons

Some time back, Tim O’Reilly (The Architecture of Participation) echoed and applied some observations from Dan Bricklin (the Cornucopia of the Commons) about the architecture of Napster and  other significant web-based systems. The individual details are well worth reading, but here’s the summary form. There are several common models for how to build large datasets that are valuable to people:

  1. Pay people to build it (Bricklin calls this “Organized Manual”). Examples include the original Yahoo! directory of the web, and the Encyclopedia Britannica. There’s an variant that represents smart algorithms rather than just human effort (Bricklin: “Organized Mechanical”): this is how Google has built its indexes. But it still represents a significant monetary investment by somebody who probably expects something in return.
  2. Get volunteers (Bricklin’s “Volunteer Manual”): Wikipedia is the preeminent example here, along with Linux, the Open Directory Project, and a great many open source projects. People do this work because they value the end result, and the project coordinates and magnifies those efforts.
  3. Architect in such a way that individual self-interest creates collective value.

Napster (the original peer-to-peer version) was proposed by Bricklin as a prime example of the third model: simply by listening to your music (within the Napster ecosystem), the default settings meant you were also sharing that music with everybody else. Quoting Bricklin:

What we see here is that increasing the value of the database by adding more information is a natural by-product of using the tool for your own benefit. No altruistic sharing motives need be present, especially since sharing is the default.

This is Bricklin’s Cornucopia of the Commons (an allusion to Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons): a system designed in such a way that use brings overflowing abundance.

(You might think blogging and twittering are like this, but they’re not. Nobody tweets because it has direct, inherent value to them: instead, it’s an outgrowth of a narcissistic, self-centered open, generous belief that what i say might have value to others. Few of us would do it if nobody else was listening. )

Models for Data Creation In Biblical Studies

All that (and Napster!) is now history, and i don’t want to get distracted by the peer-to-peer model that made Napster so powerful (Bricklin argues that’s not the reason it succeeded), or the legal issues that led to its demise. Instead, i want to reflect here on how these principles apply to Biblical studies and software.

With Logos 4, we’ve launched a major expansion of our Biblical Knowledge, by expanding Biblical People, adding Places and Things, and building around the large set of concepts we call the Logos Controlled Vocabulary. This was accomplished through the Organized Manual method: we paid a bunch of people (me included) to architect and populate this data, in a major development effort that stretched over several years. You could view the vast network of links that make Logos more than just a collection of texts as an extension of the same principle (through the resulting software program doesn’t look so much like a database). It represents literally hundreds of thousands of hours of effort in book markup and design, along with lots of “Organized Mechanical” algorithmic work.

There are also lots of examples of Volunteer Manual projects related to the Bible. The Sword Project is like Linux for Bible software. e-Sword has a smaller group of developers, but the same framework of a volunteer effort which is given away. Open Scriptures is building a platform and API for others to use in building Bible-based applications. Web 2.0 efforts like YouVersion let people tie their reflections directly to the Biblical text, and numerous projects have sprung from the Wikipedia mold like Theopedia. My own SemanticBible projects are much more limited, but in a similar spirit.

Logos has been active with the Volunteer Manual approach as well. The Logos Topics website combines our Organized Manual data and architecture of topics with user-contributed extensions of additional terminology, links within Logos, and even links to other websites. This lets us do some neat things like extending the desktop application content through user contributions on the web. Like Wikipedia, these are altruistic contributions from people who want to share their knowledge with others.

Sermons.logos.com works in a similar fashion: if you’re a pastor who writes down your sermon, and you’re willing to upload and share it, lots of others (both on the web and in Logos software) can benefit from what you’ve created. This is closer to the Cornucopia of the Commons model, but it’s still a voluntary and indirect process: my sermon doesn’t get shared as a natural by-product of my preparation activity.

The Cornucopia and Bible Study

The interesting question to me is how to achieve the third model, where my own use of a tool provides a direct benefit to others through a network, not because i’m behaving altruistically but simply because the system is architected to work that way. This is closely related to the whole Web2.0 meme (can it really have been five years already?!?) of “software that gets better the more it gets used.”

One thought: lots of web sites use RefTagger to provide a nice pop-up of Bible text for their readers, a benefit that enriches the experience of visitors to their site. Twitter users can similarly use ref.ly to shorten Bible references, which, like RefTagger links,  in turn resolve to references on Bible.Logos.com.   Could those links be converted into data indicating, for example, the relative popularity of different verses, and then displayed back to users?

Aggregating users’ operation of Logos software (in a suitably anonymized fashion, of course) could also provide data on the most popular resources, searches, and topics, which could then be turned around into recommendations (“Looking for a Bible dictionary article on ‘marriage’? Here are the ones our users have found most useful ….”).

But none of these seem to me to accomplish the full promise of the Cornucopia of the Commons. There has to be more here than simply harnessing popularity (though sites like Digg and del.icio.us have shown how useful that can be). I’m still trying to imagine what data sets could be created by people who are already committed to Bible study, as a normal outgrowth of what they do anyway. Any thoughts? Please share a comment.