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MetaV Roadmap

MetaV Roadmap: Concordance

This is the second in a series of posts outlining the roadmap for MetaV.  Previously I laid out changes planned for tables involving people.  This article will discuss changes to concordance related data.

Concordance

Few things are more commonplace in the back of study Bibles than a concordance.  MetaV contains Strong’s concordance, which is the most widely used, compiled by David Troidl as a contribution to the Open Scriptures project.  It can be hard to imagine improvements on such a “staple”, but allow me to offer a few ideas.

Definitions and word origins

First, the definitions in MetaV include some details about word origins and both the long and short definitions given by Dr. James Strong.  By splitting these three elements into their own fields, some advanced tools can be made.  Take, for instance, “adynatos” (G102).  It comes from G102 which comes from G1 which is of Hebrew origin.  I can think of many visualizations or programmatic comparisons to find similar words throughout the Bible or simply understand the meaning of that word more fully.

Proper Names

Strong’s Concordance includes many proper names of places and people.  In order to more deeply integrate the distinct parts of MetaV, these proper names could be linked to the place ID or person ID in those tables.  I have found these activities helpful in finding gaps, inconsistencies, and other potential errors in corresponding data sets.

Other Improvements

A minor improvement can be made in the near future to remove accent marks from transliterations for better readability.

That’s all for now.  Keep an eye out here to learn how we can improve upon data describing places and periods of time, or find out about the applications being developed to explore this data.