OSIS? 2.0.1 User's Manual - Web services are running on AMBIB

provides a standard way to express such documents, which is important because it saves
time, money, and effort for:
• authors, who will have less need to adjust their manuscripts for each different
potential publisher;
• publishers, who will gradually come to experience lower costs by not having to
manage converting texts presented by authors in so wide a variety of formats, and
by not having to provide texts in a different form to each electronic-book system
vendor out there (or pay indirectly for those vendors to do the conversions).
• and softw<strong>are</strong> vendors, who can avoid writing a lot of code to manage different
formats, and thus make their programs smaller, faster, and more reliable.
The <strong>OSIS</strong> development team closely studied previous Bible encoding forms, as well as
tools for literary encoding in general. By doing this we hope we have avoided some
weaknesses, and gained from some strengths, of each one, and we thank the many people
who worked on those prior specifications, as well as those who have provided help and
feedback in developing <strong>OSIS</strong> itself, and testing it by encoding large numbers of Biblical
and related texts. A list of participants may be found in an Appendix.
Users familiar with the Text Encoding Initiative will find <strong>OSIS</strong> markup quite familiar,
because the bulk of the elements we define correspond directly to TEI elements, and
almost always have the same name (though often simplified content). The schema also
provides a TEIform attribute for such elements, so they can be recognized by form-aw<strong>are</strong>
processors as equivalent to their TEI counterparts. We have attempted to point out any
elements below that do not have TEI equivalents, for the sake of anyone using both
systems.
<strong>OSIS</strong> is provided as a free resource by the Bible Technologies Group (or BTG),
which is a collaborative effort of the American Bible Society, the Society of Biblical
Literature, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the United Bible Societies, other Bible
Societies and related groups, and individual volunteers around the world. <strong>OSIS</strong> is
designed to meet the needs of diverse user communities who read, study, research,
translate or distribute biblical texts. This introduction gives a brief overview of <strong>OSIS</strong>
before leading you step by step through producing your first <strong>OSIS</strong> text.
For more information on <strong>OSIS</strong>, you may wish to join the <strong>OSIS</strong> Users' Group. To do so,
send mail to osis-user@whi.wts.edu, setting the Subject line to "subscribe". Online
information about <strong>OSIS</strong> is also available at http://www.bibletechnologies.org and
http://www.bibletechnologieswg.org.
2. Getting started
The first question that is often asked when learning that <strong>OSIS</strong> uses XML (a markup
language) is: "I'm not a computer person. Can I learn to use <strong>OSIS</strong>?" If you can type and
use even the most basic word processor or computer text-editing program, the answer is
clearly "Yes!" <strong>OSIS</strong> was designed to be offer the beginning user a simple way to do the