Open Siddur Project Development Status as of 11/11/2009

Our third development status covers progress on the Open Siddur made since our last update 9/22/09. Email aharon@opensiddur.org if you want to include something we haven’t covered. For now we’ll be sending these out once a month but if you’d like to get news of Open Siddur as it happens, make sure to follow @opensiddur at Twitter.

Contributions

Aharon read through Reb Zalman’s weekday and shabbat evening siddur and prepared the document for sharing as a PDF as well as in the ODT (open document) format. Folks can now use this to help make their own siddurim offline while we continue to work on creating our online open siddur web application. Want to craft your own siddur using material from Reb Zalman’s siddur? Check it out here.

We need a print copy of Siddur Torah Ohr (pre-1923) to correct and proof a digital transcription of the siddur already available CC-BY-SA at wikisource. Do you have one we could use? Please let us know. With this text vetted and proofed, we could use it to help folk begin making their own siddurim as well as for comparing it with our transcription of Siddur Avodat Israel.

Manual transcription of Seligman Baer’s Siddur Avodat Israel slowed over the last few months, but this is the easiest place someone with little technical capability can make a big difference. Every line of text transcribed is digitally liberated for use in future siddurim. If you haven’t yet, register on the wiki and start transcribing here.

Software Development

Efraim completed an implementation of XPointer to be used in our XSLT transforms and XQuery.  In the process, he developed a generic parser generator for XSLT (http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org/XSLT_Grammar_Parser).  This is a prerequisite to the continued development of (1) toolkit APIs that grab ordered text segments from JLPTEI documents and (2) transforms to convert JLPTEI to other forms. The code is complete and committed to subversion.  The code has had some minimal testing.
Efraim explains in more detail in a posting on our listserve: http://groups.google.com/group/jewishliturgy-discuss/browse_thread/thread/61285fef05e1846f

Efraim also finished a first pass of XSLT code to combine multiple overlapping hierarchies as described on our wiki.  Finishing this take us one step closer to processing JLPTEI.  Help wanted!

Azriel’s OSNAT (Open Siddur Network Application for Transcription) is still pre-alpha, but includes a fly in-browser Hebrew Unicode 5.0 standard keyboard. Interested and familiar with Javascript and jQuery?

We are always looking for more software developers! Please contact us with your skills.

Documentation

We are still looking for volunteers to just look over our documentation and help us know how it reads and where we can make improvements. Anyone can freely register to edit on our wiki.

Organization/Structure

w00t! The Open Siddur now has a mission statement. see http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org/Mission_Statement

How can we better track progress now that we have a list of milestones (http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org/Milestones)? Aharon is thinking of a fractal tree showing milestone markers and child dependencies.

Communication and Promotion

We had our third Open Siddur Open Chat at irc://irc.freenode.net/jewisliturgy on October 16th. The logs of the chat are available on our wiki at http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org/IRC_Conference

Our next Open Chat is scheduled for November 22nd, 11am EST.

Team Member Updates

At Yeshivat Hadar, Aharon is studying with R. Elie Kaunfer the evolution of Jewish spiritual practice in prayer and meditation and where Jewish liturgy supports this practice in the evolution of nusaḥ.

“Development Status (2009-11-11)” is shared through the Open Siddur Project with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.

the Hierophant

A hierophant is a person who invites participants in a sacred exercise into the presence of that which is deemed holy. The title, hierophant, originated in Ancient Greece and combines the words φαίνω (phainein, "to show") and ‏τα ειρα (ta hiera, "the holy"); hierophants served as interpreters of sacred mysteries and arcane principles. For the Open Siddur Project, the Hierophant welcomes new contributors and explains our mission: ensuring creatively inspired work intended for communal use is shared freely for creative reuse and redistribution.