TIP of the day: Ancient history and user supplied data

MJ. Smith
MJ. Smith MVP Posts: 53,405
edited November 20 in English Forum

1. It was about seven years ago that Bob P. "reprimanded" me for not staying within the confines of the Logos Controlled Vocabulary for the new user maintained supplement to the Topic Guide. (I still complain about the boundaries of the LCV). This feature consists of two parts: topic information and reading lists. The first has nearly disappeared while the second has finally caught on among a group of users.

The topic portion contains:

  • alternative names provided by users so that your terminology "Lord's Supper", "Communion", ... is represented. It also allows for the preservation of odd facts like the name of Noah's wife from the book of Jubilees.
  • web links intended for the top few resources. Note this was before the integration of Wikipedia or the availability of the Jewish Encyclopedia or Catholic Encyclopedia as resources. But as a place to store links to other websites, it still has potential value should users choose to utilize it.
  • key passages which has been successfully replaced by the Passages data of Factbook
  • optionally, a reading list associated with the LCV entity may be provided.

2. The information in the topic record maps directly into the topics.logos.com section of the Topic Guide. It provides the link to the Reading List if there is one. Note that this essentially allows the users to curate a "top resources" list for each LCV entity.

3. The Faithlife wiki referred to in the Factbook is about 4 years old. This is the only visibility of it of which I am aware.

4. This wiki for the Logos application has links in Factbook but has not been publicized for user input. I would hope that some standard layouts will be developed before users are encouraged to populate this data. Note that the URL given on this page is already dead, indicated that Faithlife has not developed a method of checking/updating URL's.

5. Freebase is a user curated database of people, places and things. Logos users can join to add entries to this database. At the moment I don't know of anyway to see more than the name of the entry within the Logos/Verbum application.

6. To see the Freebase entry within Logos you need to invoke the Community tag tool - or a Community tag that utilizes Freebase.

7. The first entry for Ambrose with icon and type label is from Logos. The second marked label without icon or type label is from Freebase.

8. Why does one need to resort to Freebase? Because of the slowness of the LCV to add such things as all the Logos authors or the rabbis of the Talmuds.

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Examples from the web links in topic.logos.com:

Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."

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