The ACAI project annotates information about people and places in the Bible. Specifically, it annotates the original languages at the word and phrase level for specific instances of people, places, and other entities. When used with a word-level alignment to a translation of the Bible (see Biblica's Alignments) this information can be useful in all sorts of translation contexts.
ACAI also contains information about those entities including a preferred label, description, and information about relationships with other entities.
As you encounter issues or have questions, please contact Rick Brannan at rick.brannan@biblionexus.org.
This release of the ACAI data (the JSON and Markdown forms included here) is under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. See LICENSE.md for more details.
Identifiers in the ACAI ecosystem consist of two parts. The first part represents the type of identifier (e.g. people, places, deities, groups, fauna, flora, realia). The second part is a unique identifier representing the specific record. For example, the identifier for Aaron as a person is person:Aaron.
The structure of the JSON is flat; we simply have all the records of a single type (e.g. people) in individual JSON files in the ACAI type folder/directory. The JSON files are named with the identifier, sans type, as the filename. For example, the JSON file for Aaron as a person is Aaron.json.
However, there are many people like Abraham who are known by more than one name within the biblical canon. Each of these forms of Abraham has a separate record encoded as JSON, so we have both Abraham.json and Abram.json. When multiple forms of a thing exist, it is useful to know which is the primary form. Each record contains an id and a primary_id. When id and primary_id for a record match, the record can be considered the primary form of the record; the other forms are encoded in the referred_to_as list contained elsewhere in the record. The primary record contains data for all forms of the entity, in word level references, pronominal referents, and subject referents. The non-primary records only contain references to the specific form of the record (e.g. Abram).
The specification of primary and non-primary records is consistent through all ACAI types.
In most applications (“where are all the places ‘Abraham’ occurs in the Bible?”), it is anticipated that the information in the primary record is what will be required.
Each record contains a localizations object that contains a preferred_label and a description. The description is a curated, free-text description of the entity. The JSON records support localization and in the future may have material in languages beside English.
The data included in this release is a snapshot of the data as of 2024-11-08. It includes JSON files and Markdown files for each record. The Markdown files are generated from the JSON files (along with some Berean Standard Bible text alignment data). They are only included as a visualization of the data within the JSON and not intended to direct or dictate how the JSON data should be used or rendered.
- Biblica/Clear-Bible's Macula Hebrew
- Biblica/Clear-Bible's Macula Greek
- Biblica/Clear-Bible's speaker-quotations, an attempt to identify the original language words, in both the Old and New Testaments, translated as quotations (material using “double” and ‘single’ quotation marks) in various English Bibles. It also attempts to associate speakers with the quotations, where possible, using data from Faith Comes By Hearing.
- United Bible Societies' UBS Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (UBSDBH) and UBS Dictionary of the Greek New Testament (UBSDGNT). See SemanticDictionary.org for an implementation and the git repo ubs-open-license for data (English, French, Spanish, and Chinese). Macula Hebrew and Greek encode domains and references from these resources at the word level for most OT and NT words.
- openbible.info Bible Geocoding Data
- Robert Rouse's theographic-bible-metadata (aka viz.bible)
- STEPBible TIPNR
- Patristic Text Archive JSON/XML versions of TIPNR (with persons and places separated)
- Copenhagen Alliance versification-specification. Bible references within this data reflect the 'ORG' scheme specified by the Copenhagen Alliance. This means that Old Testament references assume the versification structure of the Hebrew Bible, and New Testament references assume the structure of the Greek New Testament. For use with translations, the references may need to be be converted to the Copenhagen Alliance 'ENG' scheme. The repo cited above has information and sample code for how to achieve that; if assistance is needed please contact us.
Each of these sources are available as CC-BY-4.0 or CC-BY-SA-4.0 licensed data.