Vic, Phil, Rick, Kyle, Mark . . . After L10, what next?

MJ. Smith

Vik, Phil, Rick, Kyle, Mark and other powers that be, 

This is my personal opinion of the “obvious” next steps for Logos 10. In general, Logos/Verbum 10 has been well received and seen as a major step forward. However, it has also highlighted where additional progress is needed, low-hanging fruit if you will, using content development staff and the programming staff. The list is in no particular order. 

1. Labels: Sermon, Personal letter, Lecture (and I would like to add Hymn). Here, I am no longer seeing incremental progress. With Sermons you prototyped a solution as user generated sermon labels appeared as sermons in the search and guides. Extending this pattern to the other labels and making the labels shareable would be a major step forward for utilizing this feature. 
2. Tagging: the rebranding of Community tags as Factbook tags has been a resounding success. Regular updates across more resources with expanding AI capabilities (I understand the current data to be proof-of-concept) will be greatly appreciated. However, it has also highlighted the limitations of Factbook tags. The resources on which they are based have a high Western Christian bias. Tags oriented towards Judaism, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox are needed. A way for users to inform FL of items they wished to tag but could not is needed. “Could not” should be interpreted as ambiguous entries so one could not select which was appropriate, missing alternative names so one could not find the entry, and totally missing entries. 
3. Outline and Pericopes appear to have no procedure to ensure the data is complete. Users are forced to report errors for them to be updated in many cases. This is a simple procedural issue for Faithlife. 
4. The predefined collections – church fathers, catechisms, and church documents – similarly frequently depend on user complaints rather than being automatically updated. Expanding the predefined collections to cover the corpuses used by the Ancient Literature and the Catholic Topical Index sections of the Passage Guide would also be a major help to the less experienced users. 
5. Just yesterday, a complaint about the loss of the ability to use user-created timelines as was available in L3 was mentioned. Given that the display engine has been kept in support of the library type timeline, adding the user-created timeline feature back in seems practical. 
6. There are many timeline flags in resources that need to be linked with the Timeline. To the extent that this cannot be automated, allow users to make the link. 
7. Help cards: when help cards were implemented, the Help document was not restructured to work well with it i.e., the first snippet of an entry being the help most likely needed. 
8. The Bible Sense Lexicon has not met its full potential and risks misuse because it has not been expanded to show the non-hierarchical relationships. Synonyms, antonyms, entailment, . . . 
9. The Concordance tool has not met its full potential because it deals only with words in a simplistic sense rather than lexical units which may be multi-word. Adding n-gram capabilities would have an exponential effect on usefulness. 
10. The analysis of the text is heavily grammatical with morphological breakdowns. It could easily be expanded to a more philological sememe breakdown and closer tie-ins with the etymological dictionaries.    
11. Foundational work was done to support linking bibliographic references to resources released in the future. I understand that the design needs to be reworked but the concept is solid and would relieve the complaints regarding the gap between advertised linkage and actual linkage between resources. 
12. The entire framework for liturgical dates requires reworking to tie dates together for sermons, lessons, lectionaries, missals/ritual books across denominational and historical lines. I can easily put together details on how this works. 
13. Factbook needs more meat on its bones and more consistent coverage for the elements representing features e.g., the pseudepigraphic entries with the L10 release. This might be a possible crowd sourcing component of the Factbook tagging effort. 
14. A push was made a couple of years back to divide the library monograph designation into more specific subgroups. The current library types need to be documented so that users can report errors; additional categories need to be added. 
15. Because of the difficulty in creating datatypes, there are resources lacking datatypes even when they are routinely referenced by milestones. All “ancient” literature should be reviewed for tagging and updating where appropriate. In addition to ancient literature, most confessions (creeds, statements of faith, etc.) also are referenced by milestones, as are Catholic church documents. Outside the obvious candidates, you may wish to ask for user input 
16. The attaching of era and theological base for commentaries, systematic theologies, and biblical theology resources needs to be completed. 
17. The range of workflows would be greatly expanded by allowing them to apply to multiple readings (as in a liturgical day) and to include art as an element of study. Both are supported by resources available in the library but not by workflows. 
18. The semantic roles are nearly hidden in the system. They would be easier to use if the analysis view of the search allowed switching more easily from grammatical to semantic roles and back. Some integration with the Bible and morphological searches would also be helpful.
19. In the Context Menu there are often many labels and datatypes that cover a span of text, not simply a single word. An easy way to see the span of the label or datatype could be very helpful.
20. Expanding the facets of the Bible Browser to include the newer labels would help with program consistency.
21. Resources for lists e.g., Bible lists and Church history lists, need a mechanism for user suggested additions.
22. Convert some of the user-maintained tools into official tools e.g. Fr. Roza's DSS online index and the pericope parallels from the NRSV.
23. Expand the coverage of the Questions and Answers dataset, especially with regards to questions tied to scripture references from Bible study guides; expand the coverage of Popular quotations to expand into Verbum; expand the coverage of Today in History to be more reflective of the pre-reformation Church.

I have deliberately kept this list focused on polishing current features rather than building new features and have not indicated the priority I would give each item. There may be additional items that I have missed, especially if they pertain to portions of the program I rarely use. 

Edited to include the most recent datasets - questions and answers etc.

Wild Eagle

Corresponding Highlights still don’t work on mobile devices, which makes this feature useless because I add new highlights on mobile and on the desktop it is messing with different translations if the feature is on.