OSIS TECHNICAL COMMITTEE MINUTES

May 22, 2003

TC members present:
Steve DeRose, BTG, chair
Kees Deblois, UBS, vice-chair
Patrick Durusau, SBL
Troy Griffits, Crosswire Bible Society
Kirk Lowery, Westminster Hebrew Institute, secretary pro tem
Mike Perez, ABS
Todd Tillinghast, ContentFrameworks.com

Others present:
John Walker, SIL
Darrel Eppler, SIL
Chris Little, Crosswire Bible Society
Nathan Miles, UBS
Nick Garbidakis, ABS

Issues and Decisions

1. [1.1.1] Remove dead element <cell>

   ACCEPTED

2. [1.1.2] Milestones

   Background:
   <milestone> marks special breaks. <milestoneSE> encapsules <closer>, <abbv>, <div>, etc. It is intended to be a stand-in for crossing elements. It’s the overlapping hierarchy solution.

   Two views of markup hierarchy: (1) BSP (Book, Section, Paragraph) approach: viewing the biblical text hierarchy as pericopes, chapter and verse secondary; (2) BCV (Book, Chapter, Verse) approach: chapter and verse primary, pericopes secondary.

   From software point of view: BCV preferred. Academics like it. BFES likes it. UBS/ABS/SIL like BSP. One way is better than two. Can satisfy the BCV camp using osisRefs using BSV.

   Proposed:

   1. Applications must support BSP (BCV optional)

   2. Documents, including Bible texts must include osisIDs

   3. Add “chapter” to <mileStoneSE> type attribute

   4. Keep <verse> container, which is canonical container for Bibles, but other texts (e.g., Church fathers) have canonical containers, too. So we need to specify “what container(s) are canonical?” See point 5.

   5. An attribute called canonical is globally available and always optional, inherits like lang attribute.

      The default for <verse> is canonical true, for <note> is canonical false and no other element type specifies a default for the canonical attribute; if canonical is true, require osisID; create <chapter> element; add chapter to mileStoneSe type; remove chapter from div type; <chapter> is optional splitID attribute; <div> does not have a splitID

   6. Elements that cannot be splittable

• osis

• osisText

• osisCorpus

• div

• head.*

If <div> crosses chapter, <chapter> must break (either splitID or mileStone).

0. milestoneStart, milestoneEnd, should be globalWithoutType, attribute value should be milestoneSE which now does not combine with osisMilestoneSE to allow extension.

   [Document how to mark up book/chapter/verse when there is no section/paragraph information. ]

   So one can have a <book><chapter><verse></verse></chapter></book> container hierarchy, if there are no sections or paragraphs. If there are sections and/or paragraphs, then at least the cross-over chapters and verses must be milestones.

ACCEPTED AS “OSIS conforming”

3. Proposal:

   Is it permissable to have chapter/verse containers and milestones in the same <osisText>?

   Best Practice: Recommend that one avoids mixing chapters as containers and chapters as milestones within a single document.

   ACCEPTED

4. Simple <mileStone> can have the canonical attribute. <mileStoneEnd> does not get the canonical attribute because it is error-prone and for data normalization.

   ACCEPTED

5. <mileStoneStart> may have canonical attribute, but <mileStoneEnd> may not have the attribute.

   ACCEPTED

6. [2.1] Add section, front, body, back, titlePage, introduction, index, preface, afterword, colophon, entry, dedication, acknowledgments, majorsec, subsec, coverPage, gazetter, commentary, devotional, map, imprematur to the type attribute on <div>.

   ACCEPTED

7. [2.2] Add all children of <verse> to <catchWord>.

   ACCEPTED

   We want an example for the documentation for <note> in <catchWord>.

8. Issue 2.3 “lang/script/ews” deferred until tomorrow.

   ACCEPTED

9. [2.4] Allow <table> and <list> in <p> and <speech>. Subject to Patrick’s objections, elimination any differences of content model and attributes between <q> and <speech>, i.e., they become synonyms or aliases of each other.

10. [2.5] osisID as a list, then it points @ “at” with osisRef with grain

    We need to say in the documentation, that applications are expected to discard or map the grain when they cannot get a hold of the right translation.

    DEFERRED until tomorrow [Todd is writing up a summary for approval.]

11. [2.6] Should osisRef be allowed as a <list>?

    Are there discontinuous references?

    DEFERRED until tomorrow