Bibleref: a Microformat for Bible References
"Bibleref: a Microformat for Bible References" was presented at
BibleTech:2008 (Seattle, January 25, 2008). Although Bible references
are already ubiquitous online — in sermons, blog posts, and scholarly
discussions — they're hard for search engines and other tools to
reliably detect and disambiguate: a string like "Mark 1" is
simultaneously a Bible reference, a World War I tank, and a British
railway carriage, and abbreviations, language variants, and partial
matches complicate things further. The proposed solution, "bibleref,"
follows the microformats pattern popularized by Tantek Çelik at
Technorati: rather than inventing a new standard, it repurposes
existing HTML (a class="bibleref" attribute, with an optional
title attribute to disambiguate) so that authors can mark Bible
references directly in their existing markup with minimal effort —
technically closer to POSH ("Plain Old Semantic HTML") than to a full
microformat.
The talk covered how bibleref could be adopted by hand, through blogging plugins that had already added support for it (a WordPress ESV plugin, the Holy Scripturizer), or automatically via Logos Bible Software's client-side "Bibleref Tagger" JavaScript, and closed with a call to action — a "Bibleref Pioneers" page inviting site owners to adopt the format. It's an early, practical instance of the "lower-case semantic web" approach: adding just enough machine-readable structure to existing web content to make it more useful, without requiring a wholesale platform or standard.