Weaving the New Testament into the Semantic Web
Weaving the New Testament into the Semantic Web was presented at the 2006 Society of Biblical Literature meeting. After an introduction to Semantic Web concepts (RDF, URIs, and OWL, the Web Ontology Language, as a standard for machine-readable semantics rather than document markup), the talk presented New Testament Names (NTN), an OWL knowledgebase giving a unique, disambiguated identifier to every named person and place in the New Testament — 48 classes and 38 properties covering 647 instances and 4,200 RDF triples, with family, social, and locative relationships attached to each entity (e.g. distinguishing the New Testament's six Marys or five Alexanders). It also showed the data linked to the Composite Gospel Index, so that textual mentions of a figure like Herod or John the Baptist could resolve to the same NTN identifier across Gospel accounts.
At the time, NTN was — by the speaker's account — the first publicly available Bible data modeled in OWL. The entity-disambiguation and knowledge-representation problems raised here (assigning stable identifiers, resolving shared names, linking mentions back to a shared model) became the direct basis for later work: the Bible Knowledgebase, presented at BibleTech in 2009 and extended in 2011, grew out of the same approach to organizing biblical entities.