Almanac.Logos.com - A new public wiki

Today we've gone live with http://almanac.logos.com. This is a new site that serves as a searchable archive of information about the Christian world.

You can think of it as "Wikipedia for Christian people and organizations," but there's more to it. We're using a semantic wiki engine that lets us add semantic tagging to articles and then build queries against that tagging. So a professor can mark themselves as "faculty of" a particular school, and they will automatically be added to the faculty list page of that school without having to go and edit it specifically.

The Almanac is in a first-draft state, but it's live and can be edited by anyone with a Logos.com account. It's licensed so that the information can be re-used, and you can even legally paste content from Wikipedia into it. As more information is added, and as more semantic tagging is done, we'll have the ability to do interesting queries and "connect the dots" in creative ways. (For example, running a search for all the seminary profs who share a particular area of interest, organized by school, in order to find potential collaborators for a paper.)

Please check it out, and let us know what you think. Feel free to make edits or suggestions, too!

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Comments

Terry Poperszky

Today we've gone live with http://almanac.logos.com. This is a new site that serves as a searchable archive of information about the Christian world.

You can think of it as "Wikipedia for Christian people and organizations,"

Are you saying that all of the organizations listed are "Christian Organizations"? May I ask what criteria you used?

Bob Pritchett

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/136060#Comment_136060

Are you saying that all of the organizations listed are "Christian Organizations"? May I ask what criteria you used?

There's non precision here. The Almanac is flexible and editable; "Christian" is our default label just to keep some sort of loose scope -- we don't want to re-create Wikipedia, we want to build a database that's related to our users in the context of Bible study. So every school may not be a "Christian school", but we don't want to add every school on earth -- just ones relevant to people involved in Biblical studies, etc.

J.R. Miller

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/136063#Comment_136063

Neat idea Bob. I have forwarded the link on to several friends at Radio stations and schools to encourage their participation.

Blessings

Terry Poperszky

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/136063#Comment_136063

There's non precision here. The Almanac is flexible and editable; "Christian" is our default label just to keep some sort of loose scope

Sorry, was looking more at the Denominations rather than the schools. Really not trying to be a pain here, but I am wondering about the inclusion of religious organizations commonly held to be cults.

Rosie Perera

Today we've gone live with http://almanac.logos.com. This is a new site that serves as a searchable archive of information about the Christian world.

Thanks for this, Bob.

I noticed that, as is often the case, Regent University and Regent College have been entirely confused and conflated into one. All the professors with email addresses @regent.edu are listed under Regent College, which is incorrect. (Regent College's domain name is regent-college.edu.) This is a common problem. Our receptionist (at Regent College) gets calls from people looking for professors at Regent University quite regularly. Arggh! We had the name first (1968 vs. 1978).

I can't fix this because when I tried editing their individual pages to change their faculty field from Regent College to Regent University, I got this error:

Actually, Regent University isn't even a seminary or graduate school, so maybe it shouldn't be listed, and those professors should simply be removed. Or there should be a new section added for Christian Colleges (undergraduate).

Here are the profs who don't belong on Regent College's page that I can't remove:

Alexander Estrelda
Antipas L. Harris
Archie T. Wright
Clifton R. Clarke
Dale M. Coulter
Diane Chandler
Graham H. Twelftree
Howard Foltz
J. Rodman Williams
James Flynn
John Rea
Jon Ruthven
Joseph Umidi
Joy Brathwaite
Kevin Spawn
Lyle J. Story
Mara Crabtree
Mark Wilson
Martha Williams
Michael Palmer
Peter Grabe
Peter Prosser
Randall Pannell
Robert Sivigny
S. David Moore
Skip Horton-Parker
Stanley Burgess
Tjiong Wie Liang
Victor H. Cuartas
Vinson Synan
Vondey Wolfgang
Yong Amos

All of them also have the incorrect address info that's associated with Regent College, on their pages.

Another problem that I wasn't able to correct (got a similar error) was the spelling of Thena Ayres's name. She's spelled wrong as Thiena Ayres.

Thiena Ayres

Also, all of the Regent College professors have the wrong phone number listed for them, and I can't correct that either, as I get the same database error. They've got 604-228-1820 listed, but that's the phone number of the Regent College Bookstore. The main phone number of Regent College is 604-224-3245.

Another problem is that all faculty pages are missing the breadcrumb links at the top to get back to where you came from, or at least to the home page.

Mike Aubrey

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/136115#Comment_136115

I noticed that, as is often the case, Regent University and Regent College have been entirely confused and conflated into one. All the professors with email addresses @regent.edu are listed under Regent College, which is incorrect. (Regent College's domain name is regent-college.edu.) This is a common problem. Our receptionist (at Regent College) gets calls from people looking for professors at Regent University quite regularly. Arggh! We had the name first (1968 vs. 1978).
I can't fix this because when I tried editing their individual pages to change their faculty field from Regent College to Regent University, I got this error:

Hi Rosie,

It looks I'm having the same problem editing. Are there other pages you can't edit? This appears to be a problem across the board with editing faculty. I'm looking into why this is happening and I'll let you know when its fix.

Another problem is that all faculty pages are missing the breadcrumb links at the top to get back to where you came from, or at least to the home page.

This is a result of the semantic approach we've taken in implementing this wiki. If you click on edit on the Seminaries and Graduate Schools page, you'll see that there aren't actually any schools listed. The list is simply a result of the query:

The same is true of all of the professors listed as well for each individual school

This makes it possible to search for unique bits of information such as which professors attended the University of Toronto. This would require using the following query:

[[degree::from::University of Toronto]] | format=ul

http://almanac.logos.com/query.aspx

Edited:

I should point you to more information on the markup and the query syntax here:http://almanac.logos.com/Semantic_Wiki

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/136119#Comment_136119

It looks I'm having the same problem editing. Are there other pages you can't edit? This appears to be a problem across the board with editing faculty. I'm looking into why this is happening and I'll let you know when its fix.

I can edit certain parts of pages (e.g., the address and phone number and year founded) but when I try to edit anything that uses one of the semantic wiki fields, that's when I get the error.

I can no longer even go view the Seminaries and Graduate Schools; I get a database timeout error. Same for Denominations, Publishers, etc. I can only go to plain text pages (FAQ, etc.)

Another problem I discovered before I was unable to get into the site like this, but forgot to mention: the field name for email addresses is misspelled on all the faculty members' pages as eamil. I was able to fix it for one of the Regent College faculty members. The misspelling didn't seem to prevent clicking on that email address and bringing up Outlook with the email address already filled in, so somehow the mailto protocol is still working regardless, but the typo is wrong and should be fixed throughout if there's some easy way to do a global replace.

Mike Aubrey

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/136119#Comment_136119

The problem has been fixed, but it'll take up to a couple hours to reprocess everything before these corrections can be made (which is why you can't access anything right now). The problem was the use of the "year" relationship for academic degrees. It was changed to "date" at one point and that caused the hiccup.

Thanks for find this one for us, Rosie.

Phil Gons (Logos)

In case you missed it, we just started a new Almanac forum. We welcome any of your feedback and ideas there.