The OSIS Bible Tool‘s has a full library of resources—this article displays the library’s content for your convenience to make it easier to browse and use. The library has many Bible versions in many languages, commentaries, daily devotionals, lexicons, and dictionaries. (Their website requires navigating a collapsible menu in the left sidebar.)

 OSIS Library

Biblical Texts

About OSIS

OSIS  (Open Scriptural Information Standard) is an XML standard for encoding Bibles and other biblical research texts, which enables ministries and other organizations to collaborate more easily. Traditionally, these organizations have stored their documents in disparate, proprietary markups, making it difficult when they wish to share in service with each other. OSIS provides a common markup for multiple visions. Developed in a collaboration with CrossWire Bible Society, the Society of Biblical Literature and American Bible Society.
According to this web page by a developer, Bible File Encoding for Bible Translators, Publishers, and Software Developers, here is more information about OSIS–

This is an XML format that results from an attempt to create a universally-accepted Scripture interchange format that could replace the others. ​

The International Forum of Bible Translation Agencies appears from their web site to have endorsed the development of OSIS, but OSIS isn’t yet widely accepted and used by the actual working linguists within any of these organizations. The American Bible Society used to hose the BibleTechnologies.net web site for OSIS, but pulled the plug on it in February 2014.

​OSIS should only be used with caution. It is probably not a good choice for archival use or massive conversions of texts because of the great deal of manual labor involved and the excessive ambiguities of OSIS. An improper subset of OSIS called OXES is a little better, but never seemed to get much traction in actual use.


(editor’s note: this blog post has been corrected. Previously, the post erroneously indicated that the Bible data sets could be downloaded in OSIS XML format.)