TIP of the day: Understanding Bible person, place thing tagging

One common complaint on the forums is missing or incorrect tagging. Sometimes there is an error in the tagging, but many times it is a misunderstanding on the part of the user on how the tagging is accomplished. Understanding tagging is even more important now that we can add tags via Community tags.

1. The resources that have been manually coded with Bible person, place and thing tags are limited and all original language resources:

1. Original language words are tagged. The set of original language words that was selected for tagging was taken from LHB, SBLGNT and (parts of?) an LXX (perhaps OTGRKSWETETXT?). Words that occur outside of that corpus (e.g., bracketed θεός in Acts 3:13, NA28) are not currently tagged.

So in these resources, the tags should be accurate and any errors reported to Faithlife: "Other data problems with Bible Facts can be sent to data@logos.com."

Example:

2. Translations that have a Reverse Interlinear use the RI to find the appropriate tagging in the original language tagged resources. Here if an error is found the cause may be either the reverse interlinear alignment or the Person/Place/Thing tagging (see 1 above).  RI errors are reported to: "Problems with reverse interlinears can be sent to revint@logos.com."

3. Sometimes when you are using a Reverse Interlinear, you select the person but find that you are linked to some incorrect individuals with the same name. Logos has explained this as a historical issue:

Initially we only had a general topic for named people in the LCV, effectively "people named Mary". This reflected the organization of virtually every Bible dictionary: they put them together in a single article, typically with sub-articles distinguishing them. That makes sense in the print world, where you first look up "Mary" and then look more closely for the one you want. It doesn't make sense in the digital world (which is why the Lexham Bible Dictionary will eventually have a distinct article for each).

We've since made the LCV topics more fine-grained, to match what we have in the biblical text (in the case of Marys, we have seven). We've been going back through the dictionaries to make the linkage more specific, but we still have some data connection issues to work out so we don't lose that specificity. Just to be clear, we haven't tagged the DDD article with anything other than "people named Mary".

Rather than doing the research to see if the dictionary as a whole has been updated, I simply report errors to Faithlife: "Other data problems with Bible Facts can be sent to data@logos.com." They can sort out the why.

4. Bibles without reverse interlinears use versification and a sophisticated algorithm to identify the correct tag from one of the tagged original language resources. When this produces no tag or an incorrect tag, one may use Community tag to add the correct tag. Note that translations with unusual spellings are less likely to successfully link a tag to the Person/place/thing.

NOTE: A Search will not find these "derived tags" i.e. use "David" not <Person David>"

5. Unfortunately, it is conceivable that we receive resources for which there are no obvious reasons - spelling, versification ... - for the lack of a match. Again, Community tags allows us to fix the problem. For these, I would complain in the forums awaiting either a fix or an explanation.