XML file

[Tim Hall]

Is there any way to convert an Accordance Bible module to an XML file?

[Mark Allison]

No.

[Tim Hall]

Short sweet and to the point. Thanks Mark.

[RevM]

Is there any way Accordance would publish the file formats or database schemas for the books, then we could write a Python/Java Script/php/other script to extract an xml file - or anything else we wanted? That would be truly awesome.

 

Mark

[Helen Brown]

It would probably make the publishers and copyright holders very unhappy.

[Cnthetford]

I get that for material under copyright, but for the immense amounts of material that is in the public domain, I wouldn't see why this would be a problem.   

[Solly]

If it is in the public domain, it is already available in many user friendly file formats available from a variety of repositories. Start with Project Gutenberg, Google Books, and such sites.

 

Giving out the details of the file format allows for all types of mischief to be applied to the products that are restricted Intellectual property. A proprietary file format is a very non-obtrusive form of digital rights management.

 

This system really does work well for all concerned.

 

—Joseph

[Λύχνις Δαν]

While I get the request and have in fact made similar request of one sort or another over the years, a very great deal of what Oaktree publishes in Accordance is not public domain. I get that copyright is a major hindrance to research - it really is. People are working on that problem, but most of that is in the open-source arena. There are some texts that can be processed in Python and other languages which have documented file formats. There are not as many as many would like and the key critical texts are not among them alas. Even SBL's GNT has a tainting license which prevents wider use. 

 

I suspect if Oaktree were to provide this support they would have to have protections against doing it on anything non-PD and that would be a headache for them. And as Helen says it would make publishers jittery. As a business decision it would carry risks.

 

That said, if you want to extract certain kinds of data from Accordance and do further processing on it - statistics mostly - this is already possible. I've asked for improvements in some places for this, but it is doable. I have a blog post in the works on something like that but it will be a month or more before it's done I fear.

 

Thx

D