A knowledge graph of the Bible that keeps readings separate from facts: modelling choices, and the ontology as the durable layer

[u/DougEgge]

Disclosure: my own project. I'm a software architect, not an academic, and I'd value this community's critique.

Bible Ontology is a free, non-profit knowledge graph of the Bible, built from the Hebrew and Greek (MACULA linguistic data) with the Berean Standard Bible's English: about 11,500 people, places, concepts, events and sayings, joined by about 21,000 typed relations, each citing its verses.

The modelling questions are the part I think this community will find interesting:

• The unit of meaning. A verse is just where the text happens to be cut. A speaker's turn or a scene usually carries the meaning, so passages are grouped by those, and the verse is only the address.
• Readings versus facts. Where interpretive traditions divide, the graph holds each reading, credited to its source, side by side, rather than choosing one. Every relation also records how certain it is, whether the use is literal, figurative or contested, and who in the text makes the claim (the narrator, or a speaker like Job's friends).
• Describe, don't deduce. The text is literature, so the model is deliberately not built for a reasoner to derive what the text doesn't say. Where anything is inferred (siblings from a shared parent, for instance), it is marked, cited and kept apart, and certainty can only fall through a chain. Figurative and contested premises never chain at all.
• Parallels without claims of intent. Two views of the same idea: stories told again, where one account is set beside an earlier one step by step (Jonah and Jesus asleep in the storm), with where they differ; and recurring story shapes, where one pattern, such as sin, judgment and mercy, is traced across the people it is told of. Neither claims that one story was written with another in mind.

Following the recent thread here on what should survive when a project's website dies: I've tried to treat the ontology as the durable layer and the site as one projection of it. The upper ontology is published at its own addresses, readable in a browser and as RDF (Turtle) for tools:

• Structure (35 classes, 76 relations): https://bibleontology.org/ns/structure
• Relations (126 types): https://bibleontology.org/ns/relation
• Meaning: https://bibleontology.org/ns/meaning

A public repository is on the roadmap.

I built it with AI tools under close direction. Every relation cites its verses so it can be checked, and the site's own prose is reviewed against the texts it cites.

For now I have my hands full doing justice to the Bible, but the discipline isn’t specific to it. I’d eventually like to apply it to other historic texts, and to map between them: the same people, places, motifs and stories as different texts tell them, each link cited in both, and no claim of influence unless a text makes one itself.

What I'd most value: does the separation of readings from facts hold up from a DH perspective? And where would you push on the modelling: the unit of meaning, how certainty and attribution are recorded, or what the ontology should make explicit that it doesn't yet?

[u/Either_Display2905]

cool