Thursday, December 13, 2007

OpenBible.info Update: Mapping, Photos, Overlays, Bible Browser, Topical Bible

If you haven't checked out OpenBible.info, it is well worth a visit. I have referenced them before for their work on Bible Geocoding and Bible Atlas and their Bible Word Locator visualizations, but they have other useful resources as well.

  • Overlays for Google Earth: There is a nice collection of ancient and modern map overlays for Jerusalem, and there is another one for biblical Bodies of Water. These overlays are great in Google Earth, because you can control the transparency as well as adjusting direction and changing perspective.
  • Photos of Bible Places: Using photos from Flickr that people have geocoded, OpenBible has mashed up a list of biblical places with those photos in that spot. It's a mixed bag of results but still useful.
  • Topical Bible is "a web 2.0 topical Bible mashup" that uses the ESV Bible and the Yahoo search resources. If you what to find what the Bible says about a topic, enter a search term, and it will not simply perform a word search, but, by using related words to your search term generated by Yahoo, return a much larger collection of verses. Once these verses appear, however, users have the ability to 'vote' on how helpful they are or not to someone wanting references to this particular topic.
  • Bible Book Browser: This is a neat way to visualize the Bible. There is a picture of the whole Bible, and by moving the cursor over a particular book, you move through the various chapter headings derived from the ESV Bible. Click on the chapter, and you are brought to the ESV text.


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