OSIS Users Manual (OSIS Schema 2.1.1) By Patrick Durusau
[email protected] On Behalf of the American Bible Society © American Bible Society, 2006 1 Foreword The OSIS Users Manual is the result of years of effort by organizations and individuals who have generously donated their support and time to taking the delivery of the Bible into the 21st century. Its subject is the use of the OSIS schema, a means to put Bibles into the lingua franca of modern computers, XML (Extensible Markup Language). Once a Bible is in XML, effective delivery in whole or part in a variety of formats (print, WWW, cellphones, etc.) and use of Bible portions in a variety of contexts becomes possible for all organizations and individuals. This users manual is a guide to the 2.1.1 version of the OSIS schema. Be aware that the OSIS schema continues to evolve and work on OSIS 2.5 is currently underway. Future changes to the schema will be backwards compatible so any documents prepared following this guide will continue to be valid in the future. The OSIS development team closely studied previous Bible encoding forms, as well as tools for literary encoding in general. By doing this we hope we have avoided some weaknesses, and gained from some strengths, of each one, and we thank the many people who worked on those prior specifications, as well as those who have provided help and feedback in developing OSIS itself, and testing it by encoding large numbers of Biblical and related texts. Users familiar with the Text Encoding Initiative will find OSIS markup quite familiar, because the bulk of the elements we define correspond directly to TEI elements, and almost always have the same name (though often simplified).