Open Scripture Information Standard (OSIS) is an XML application (or schema), that defines tags for marking up Bibles, theological commentaries, and other related literature.
The OSIS schema was developed by the Bible Technologies Group, a joint committee sponsored by the American Bible Society and the Society of Biblical Literature. Other participants in the standards work are the United Bible Societies, SIL International, and various national Bible societies, along with individual expert volunteers. The officers include Steven DeRose (chair), Kees DeBlois (vice-chair), and Patrick Durusau (editor). As of mid-2006, the current version is 2.1.1.
The schema is very similar to that of the Text Encoding Initiative, though on the one hand much simpler (by omission of many unneeded constructs), and on the other hand adding much more detailed metadata, and a formal canonical reference system to identify books, chapters, verses, and particular locations within verses.
The metadata includes a "work declaration" for the work itself, and for each work it references. A work declaration provides basic catalog information based on the Dublin Core standard, and assigns a local short name for the work (similar to XML namespace declarations).
OSIS gives particular attention to encoding overlapping markup, because Bibles exhibit such markup frequently, for example verses crossing paragraph boundaries and vice versa. The OSIS schema introduced a method for encoding overlap in XML, known as Trojan milestones, or "Clix".
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“GOETHE, raised o’er joy and strife,
Drew the firm lines of Fate and Life,
And brought Olympian wisdom down
To court and mar, to gown and town,
Stooping, his finger wrote in clay
The open secret of to-day.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The Scripture was written to shew unto men the kingdom of God; and to prepare their minds to become his obedient subjects; leaving the world, and the Philosophy thereof, to the disputation of men, for the exercising of their natural Reason.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“Rejecting all organs of information ... but my senses, I rid myself of the Pyrrhonisms with which an indulgence in speculations hyperphysical and antiphysical so uselessly occupy and disquiet the mind.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)