How it works

BibleGet is a project that aims to facilitate the biblical citations in various applications. Here's how it works.

INFORMATION FOR USERS

BibleGet I/O is fundamentally a database with an engine, together with a number of programs or plugins that interact with the engine.

An online database: the BibleGet database contains different versions of the Bible. Being online makes it universally accessible, from any computer you may be working on, whether at home or at work or in any other place you might just happen to be writing up a document or a web article.

An engine (a script written in the PHP scripting language): the BibleGet engine translates bible citations written in standard notation into queries that the database can understand.
The BibleGet engine can “understand” the names of the books of the Bible in about 20 different languages. So whether you write “John” or “Giovanni” or “Jean” or “Juan” or “Johannes”, it will get you the quote you are looking for. Some asian languages are supported as well. Some abbreviated forms of the Books of the Bible are supported as well, but not all abbreviations are supported exactly as indicated in single editions of the Bible since they would conflict between languages. In order to use the abbreviated versions, you must check the table of supported Books and Abbreviations. The engine also does a series of integrity checks on the Bible citation to ensure that it is using valid notation and that it is within the chapter / verse boundaries of the particular Bible versions being requested. It will issue error messages indicating the errors in the notation if any are found. The engine can also understand two different notation formats, one which is generally used more in english speaking countries (e.g. “John 3:16,18”) and another which is generally used in european countries (e.g. “John 3,16.18”). For more information on the standard notation for biblical quotations, see Standard Notation. The engine returns the requested data (the Bible quote or quotes) in a structured data format which is useful for data exchange (three return formats are currently supported: “JSON”, “XML”, and “HTML”). How is that helpful to you? Well, the raw data directly returned from the BibleGet engine in JSON format might not be helpful to you as it is, but it will be very useful to any program that is making the request. In fact, programs understand structured data very well.

So BibleGet is also those programs, mostly plugins for Word Processing applications or for Website / Blog management systems, that can “talk” with the BibleGet engine, get the structured data, and then format it for you in the best way for your own purposes. And those plugins are what can be directly useful to you. The plugins developed by the BibleGet project seek to be as flexible as possible for you the end user, letting you choose your preferred text formatting according to the requirements of your document or web article / page. They also seek to incorporate and ensure the quality of the integrity checks as performed by the engine itself, so that the user will be notified of any malformed or out-of-bounds Bible citations before they even get sent to the online engine. Ensuring that only correct citations are sent to the server means taking some load off of the server, so that it may be available to more people requesting to use this service. They also use caching techniques where possible so that the same query is not made multiple times to the server, again avoiding unnecessary traffic to the server.

BibleGet is a complete and free solution for helping you insert Bible quotes into your documents or your web pages / articles, taking care of all the behind-the-scenes technical stuff letting you, the end user, get nicely formatted Bible quotes wherever you are working, whether in Google Docs or in OpenOffice or in WordPress or anywhere else a BibleGet plugin is available. If you would like to see a BibleGet plugin available in another text processing application, let us know and we’ll do our best to deliver it to you. (Hopefully there will soon be a better solution for Microsoft Word, we are still working on this!)

The project is an Educational Resource provided by the Roma Tre University chaplaincy. It is developed by Rev. John R. D’Orazio, the chaplain of Roma Tre University in the Diocese of Rome. The project aims to make a number of Bible texts in different languages available to the general public, and can be particularly useful to Priests, Pastors, Catechists, Theology students, Teachers, Bloggers, and generally anyone who might be interested in inserting Bible quotes into a document or webpage. It can be a useful pastoral tool as well as an educational resource.

You can test out the BibleGet engine here on the BibleGet website in the Sandbox Area to get an idea of what is happening behind the scenes when a plugin makes a request to the server for a Bible quote. The plugins currently available for download are indicated in the Applications section.

LIMITS OF USE

Some of the versions of the Bible available in the BibleGet database are For copyrighted Bible versions, there are limits. Each query made will return no more than 50 results. This means that by doing a query like "Genesis 1-50" CEI2008 "version" will not return the entire book of Genesis, but only the first chapter and the first 18 verses of chapter two (for a total of 50 verses). This is a limitation that is required for compliance with the copyright law.

INFORMATION FOR DEVELOPERS

If you are interested in developing a plugin that uses the BibleGet Endpoint service, please refer to the Developers page.