History samples uploaded

Colin, who is working on history data for timelines etc, has made very good progress:
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I've just uploaded some sample material for the history timelines,
mainly covering the New Testament church period. I've got a fair bit
more in a more draft format, but this was the easiest to get to
sufficient detail to be approximately "final".

In the google docs folder are four TL_* csv files for the timelines. In
the main STEP folder there's a specification for these TL_* files.

I've also produced (scraping the net) details of the number of
verses/chapters in each book of the Bible, uploaded as versecounts.csv.

As a proof-of-concept, derived from this uploaded data I've produced two
sets of HTML files:

Timelines at http://www.ps116.org.uk/STEP/timeline/T_All.html
Bible->timeline links at http://www.ps116.org.uk/STEP/timeline/bible.html

In the latter, there are two links per verse (not all set), one to the
timeline when the action in the verse happens, one to the timeline when
the book was written.

The bible->timeline links file is also presented in .csv format as
verserefs.csv (on Google Docs). It could clearly be stored more
efficiently than one entry per verse.

In terms of generating timelines, I've now managed to resolve the major
dating issues, so it's now a case of doing lots of OCR and typing to
produce more TL_* files.

The information in the New Testament church section is largely taken
from Finegan, with gaps filled by the chronology of House. It needs some
tidying up and filling in (ensuring that every story in Acts is
represented on the timeline, even if we don't really have a date for it)
but is the level of detail about right?

Questions:
1. I've included a field called Description, but this seems to me to now
fit better as a database of mini-articles, on (for instance) "the
Council of Jerusalem", or "the kingdom of Judah". Is producing such
articles part of the History module, another module, or are we using
some other source?
2. Both Finegan and House include a chronology of Paul from 60-67,
reconstructed mainly from the Pastoral Epistles. (Based on the work of
Moody and Hoehner respectively, largely consistent with each other.) I
wasn't sure whether to include this, given it covers an extra-Biblical
period.


I've got the Easton bible dictionary parsed (to split into articles and
find (most) Bible references) - see
http://ps116.org.uk/STEP/Easton/index.html

One thing that can be done with this relatively easily is to produce a
name->bible reference(s) database, which can then be linked with the
bible->timeline database, as per David's recent e-mail.

The majority of entries can be done automatically, as they only contain
a single bible reference, or the first reference listed is the one where
they appear, but we'll have to go through and check things, decide on
references for the more major characters and so on.

From this, we can generate a bible reference->person table to resolve
ambiguities, so clicking on Saul in 1 Samuel and Acts go to the right
people.

Do we want to do anything with the actual text of Easton or not? (Again
this is a question of scope - how are we going to generate our content
for entries like "Absalom"? I could certainly produce something that we
can use as a temporary placeholder if nothing more.)


Next tasks for me:

1. Produce at least top-level timeline files to cover the entire Bible.
(Mostly done, but need to sort formats out.)
2. Find a suitable Gospel harmony to use (this is the main dating issue
to resolve.)

These two give us a complete, if approximate, bible reference->timeline
database.

3. Further parsing of Easton to distinguish (1.) (2.) entries, to
distinguish multiple people of the same name.

4. Work through the Bible and Easton in parallel, getting a more
detailed timeline, and checking everything links up correctly, possibly
adding extra information beyond Easton, but it looks reasonably complete
to me.

5. Produce extra-Biblical timelines.

This completes the "timeline" project.

Colin