There has been a close link between the Bible and technology stretching back over centuries. Chapters and verses, some form of which are used by all churches, are a metadata system long before date scientists coined the term. The first printers produced Bibles, with a layout based on the meticulous work of scribes and monks. Today we add paragraphs, titles, footnotes and cross-references, introductions, images… And, increasingly, we publish on digital media.
Bible translation very often relies on one of the expressions of USFM, a format created at the start of the microcomputer revolution that is challenging to work with using contemporary tools. For example, there is often both a chapter/verse and a paragraph hierarchy, where one hierarchy does not fit neatly inside the other. Simple cases are simple, but it is much harder to manage the more advanced and rare cases.
Proskomma is a Javascript library that handles the complexity of Bible data. It provides a flexible interface via GraphQL, which enables the developer to build their own view of the data. It can filter, sort and structure responses to meet the needs of the application. Proskomma is used by many projects, within web browsers, on web servers and in data processing workflows. It has been tested on thousands of translations.
See the documentation for more details.