Organizing the People, Places, and Things in the Bible
The Bible Knowledgebase (BK) is a data model and growing resource for organizing the people, places, and things named in the Bible into consistently identified entities. This talk describes BK's approach to referential semantics: assigning stable identifiers to agents, places, artifacts, and realia; disambiguating entities that share names; capturing naming relations and other attributes; and linking entities back to their occurrences in the text. It covers the underlying data model, identifier and naming conventions, data sources, and representation choices, and demonstrates applications built on the resulting data — retrieval by entity, reference, name, role, and type, and visualizing the connectedness of Biblical entities.