sunlight has not found us
over forty days or more
while the flood outside provides no guide
to bring this little boat ashore

where we are this hour is not where we will be
when these liquid days are done
in a turn of light like sun on subtle rose
we will see how far we've come

i held my breath to bursting
til i found myself inhaled
three days and nights to waive my rights
in the belly of a diving whale

see it rising from the sea i see something
something that i might have missed
there's a shadow of a cloud now
a cloud no bigger than a big man's fist

what we know this hour is not what we will know
when these liquid days are done
in a turn of light like sun on subtle rose
we will see what's just begun

rivers no uprising
seas will cease to rage
when mourning's past, thank God at last
gonna come and wipe these tears away

Liquid Days, by Charlie Peacock and Douglas Kaine McKelvey, from the album Strangelanguage.
Copyright 1996 Sparrow Songs, Andi Beat Goes On Music

5:13:56 PM #    comment []  trackback []

For the hyper-super-meta-serious geek, here's some abstract comments on parsing OWL: doesn't look simple, probably one reason why Dave Beckett has some objections to OWL. I'm not deep enough into OWL to have any meaningful answers:i'm just hopeful that the imprimatur of the W3C will ensure that smart people come up with some.
4:01:34 PM #    comment []  trackback []

Not long ago i announced the first release of the New Testament Names (NTN) in OWL, the W3C standard for ontologies. Of course, data isn't all that exciting (unless you're a serious geek). I could make a good argument that, in the long run, the data is actually much more valuable than individual applications (and i hope to get around to writing that argument down one of these days), and it's arguably much harder to come by as well. But most people can still appreciate a good application more than the data behind it, though of course the data is what makes the application possible.

The best evidence of this is the NT Hyper-concordance. This continues to be the one thing on SemanticBible that brings most people around (according to the server logs),  even though the data behind it is a pretty minor transformation of an OSIS-formatted New Testament text. (by the way, i hear the ESV folks are working on a OSIS version, which i'm really looking forward to)

So i've started thinking through an initial application of NTN, a simple hyperlinked interface i call the NT Names Explorer, for browsing in several dimensions:

• the attributes and relationships for a particular instance of a name (in the example below, the woman Prisca)
• the class of the name, and its superclasses (and subclasses if any, though there are none in this example)
• other instances of that class (in this case, other women)
• a list of Scripture references (for which i'd like to have a pop-up box displaying the verse text)

This picture is linked to a larger version that may make the details clearer. Note this is a mockup, not a screenshot! It will take some real work to develop that. In particular, i'm thinking through details like

• how to parse the OWL file here: Jena seems like an obvious choice, but i'm not a Java guy, and this doesn't seem like the right opportunity for learning it, even if i had the time (which i don't right now)
• whether this can be staged as static HTML files, like Hyper-concordance: this would be my preference, because it makes life easier, and allows people to download the whole thing and use it off-line.
• the HTML coding, a bit more complex because of the multiple frames. For example,  if i click on the link for Aquila, the top frame needs to change to show the Man class, and the Instances frame on the left should then show a list of other men. This may be enough to require a dynamic data store and a server-side application

If you're got ideas, and especially if you've got relevant expertise that you'd be willing to contribute, please let me know! Comments are great, though you might want to send me an email too for backup.

3:21:30 PM #    comment []  trackback []