The Digital-AV is an SDK that exposes a digital representation of the Authorized Version of the bible. You may already know that the Authorized Version (AV) is the more proper name for the King James Version (KJV) of the bible. It was indeed authorized by King James. This is super significant in history: because prior to its authorization, bible translation into English and publication were against law in England. Underground translation and publication were punishable by death. Routinely, these executions were cruel and public. It's no secret that persecution was motivation for a small congregation to embark upon a dangerous voyage across the Atlantic on the Mayflower. These English men, women, and children, were previously living in exile. Prior to their voyage, they had fled to Holland to escape religious persecution. These brave souls sailed to the new world with their Geneva Bibles clutched in hand.
Let's just say, "Authorization was a great thing!", and let's look at the bright side of living in our day. It's worthy to note: the AV/KJV bible is written in Elizabethan-English. Some just call it "Early Modern English". In any event, King James commissioned 47 translators of world renown. Contemporaries of Shakespeare, these 47 translators clearly identified their objective: "... to make GODS holy Trueth to be yet more and more knowen unto the people ..." (in their own words, found in the introduction to the Authorized Version of 1611).
AVX is an abbreviation for AV eXtensions. Quintessentially, AVX-Framework has a digital representation of the AV bible at its core. The framework coordinates a variety of capabilities: the high-linguistic-fidelity of Digital-AV is exposed via a rich grammar called AVX-Quelle. Quelle grammar is concise, intuitive, and useful. Moreover, Quelle syntax facilitates sounds-alike searching, searching by lemma, searching by part-of-speech, wildcard searching, and equivalence-mapping of Elizabethan-English to/from modern-English search terms.
The AVX Framework incorporates the Digital-AV, the Quelle command language, and computer source code to produce a framework (i.e. a library or DLL). The framework exposes not just the AV text itself, but also a multitude of linguistic features for each word contained within the text. In short, the framework provides the original AV text, rich linguistic features, and extensive search capabilities. Under the hood, Digital-AV fully encodes: Strong's numbers, Lemmatizations, Part-of-Speech tags, named-entity types, NUPhone representation, dual lexical [text] representations via its unique bi-text lexicon. The framework makes all features exposed by the Digital-AV searchable; and it provides rendering and highlighting in a variety of formats (e.g. HTML, Markdown, YAML, and Text).
I have adopted the objective of the 47 original AV translators. Inspired by those before me, I want to make God's holy Truth to be yet more and more known! Four centuries later, it resonates as if it had been spoken only yesterday. While it is a lofty goal, I embrace it wholeheartedly! With all of the features of Digital-AV exposed via Quelle, it enables any user to stay primitive, or search with deep nuances of language. It finds bible verses, whether queries be simple or complex. Leveraging this framework, developers are empowered with an intuitive command language. Digital-AV manifests the most trustworthy English text that God has yet availed to mankind [The Authorized Version of 1611, with standardized spelling revisions of the 1769 edition].
The accuracy and trustworthiness of the AV is well documented by Edward F. Hills, in his book titled The King James Version Defended. Hills provides proof that the AV should be preferred by English speaking people everywhere. Application developers can trust the utility of AVX Framework, and place their focus on specific use-case scenarios and personas. With a license as free as the gospel, use it as you see fit (hopefully to the glory of God). The upcoming releases of AV-Bible will be built upon this foundation.
AVX-Framework offers unparalleled linguistic-search capabilities for the sacred text. Its fidelity of expression exceeds that found in most search-engines and command-languages.
AV-Engine is the central point of access to the AVX-Framework. With the debut of the "Omega" release, the Digital-AV SDK packs all of this information into a single compact binary file: it is fully indexed and its format is extensively documented. The SDK lacked a comprehensive reference implementation until now. AVX-Framework fills the void: AV-Engine is the entry-point to the framework. The codebase of AVX-Framework augments AVX-Lib, but even this library itself is packed with updates. In all, AVX-Framework introduces a wealth of new features and functionality:
- sounds-alike searching via NUPhone Representation and the companion NUPhone dotnet assembly
- ability to precisely render text, with metadata from search to accommodate term-highlighting of matched query tokens
- complete support for dual lexicons
- search by named entity type
- search by Strongs number
- search with detailed proximity rules
- rich command/search language via the Pinshot-Blue library and its PEG grammar.
- object-model representations of AVX dialect of the Quelle grammar via the Blueprint-Blue library
- AV-Engine library glues it all together
All of these search options are clearly detailed using a formal grammar as described in the Quelle specification.
It's been a quarter century since the first release of AV-Bible for Windows. In its day, it was the world's first free bible software with a graphical user interface that ran on Microsoft Windows. It was originally released as: AV-1995, AV-1996, ... , until the final releases as AV-2008 & AV-2011. A companion software development kit (SDK) emerged along side AV-2008 and AV-2011. The SDK was renamed "Digital-AV" not long after its initial debut. Over the years, I developed a few freeware products on top of it. None were ever as significant as AV-Bible. The AV-Bible application name was resurrected in 2021 as a WPF application, built with the Digital-AV SDK. It is, has been, and always will be: free.
With respect to the Digital-AV, you can rely on its foundation. With countless deployments and extensive text validation, Digital-AV has travelled the world and back with feedback from Christian missionaries, pastors, and lay people. They used it in their ministries. In return, I received treasured quality-control feedback. By 2008, all of the textual bugs were ironed out. Not coincidentally, 2008 was the first release of the SDK. Never making a dime, and pouring a healthy chunk of my life into this effort: it has been a labor of love.
AVX-Framework represents a radical step forward, at the same time as it reaches back to its roots. It began in 1995 as a fast & lean KJV search tool for Windows (written in Microsoft C++ and Borland Delphi). The modern framework is still fast & lean. They say, "The more things change, the more things stay the same." This cliche applies here. In its first incarnation, AV-Bible GUI was walled off from an in-memory database named "AV-Engine". AV-Engine is back! Once again, the GUI is walled off from the processing engine. The new engine is .NET 8, and it provides centralized access to the entire framework. AVX Framework represents the most substantial improvement to the Digital-AV SDK since its original inception. What makes things exciting is all the new things that get packaged into the new SDK. You've already seen a summary of the functionality. It's time to dig into the details ... read on!
There is just a single external dependency of AVX-Framework, besides .Net 8.0: YamlDotNet. Dotnet was chosen as it is open-source and it is cross-platform (I flirted with C++, but it is far too cumbersome, when compared to C#). YamlDotNet was chosen for its ability to parse/generate YAML, along with its liberal open source license. P/Invoke serves as the glue to facilitate efficient communication from C# to Rust. There are internal dependencies; those also are all open source and in-proc (maintained by AV Text Ministries; located at https://github.com/kwonus).
The framework is highly modular. Earlier works were much more monolithic and not well isolated from the GUI. While monolithic applications can be built faster, they are more fragile, difficult to refactor, and exhibit maintenance issues over the long haul. While a modular architecture is more labor-intensive initially, it's way easier to refactor. Modularity facilitates incremental improvements that most deltas can be accomplished in shorter timeframes. Additionally, each module can and usually does have dedicated documentation. To sum it up: it takes longer on the onset, but it's way better over time. The downside of modularity is a more complicated build sequence. However, most of my user-base is constrained to the AV-Bible application (that application will be pre-built and distributed as binaries on the Microsoft Store. If you need help building sources, please ping me). One additional benefit of modularity that I discovered is its self-documenting nature (If there is a problem found in the Blueprint-Blue sources, I know that the code has to do with model/blueprint generation; Likewise, a problem found in AV-Search sources has to do with the implementation of the search; By contrast, monolithic repos lack this clarity)
Incidentally, a modular architecture is much like a micro-service architecture, but rather than REST endpoints, invocations are made in-process. These in-proc invocations obviate the need for sophisticated plumbing and eliminate most serialization and deserialization. In-proc is also more performant than REST or even RPC. All said, a modular architecture with in-proc invocations, atop .Net 8, is a solid foundation. It has many advantages, not the least of which is rapid development and easy debugging.
Notwithstanding an abundance of internal components, consumers of AVX-Framework directly target a single dotnet assembly, namely AV-Engine. Additional capabilities are exposed by AVX-Lib and NUPhone, but those capabilities can effectively be ignored. All dependencies are self-contained and opaque. Nevertheless, modules that compose AVX Framework, along with file dependencies, are depicted in Figure 1:
Figure 1: AVX-Framework dependency diagram [rev #3C12]
Evidenced by Figure 1, serialization is used for parameters when crossing from C# into native Rust. Parameter serialization, for in-proc cross-language invocation, is used in lieu more granular parameter-marshalling, because it is both more efficient and less fragile than marshalling. All other method invocations utilize POCO (plain old C# objects). The table in Figure 2 identifies repository references, OS dependencies and/or runtime when applicable, and implementation/computer language of the library.
| Module (repository) source code folder |
Branch | OS and/or Runtime | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| Digital-AV (github.com/kwonus/Digital-AV) | master | .Net 8 | C# |
| AVX-Lib (github.com/kwonus/Digital-AV) ./omega/foundations/csharp/AVXLib |
master | .Net 8 | C# |
| NUPhone (github.com/kwonus/NUPhone) ./PhonemeEmbeddings |
main | .Net 8 | C# |
| Pinshot-Blue (github.com/kwonus/pinshot-blue) ./src |
main | Windows (x64) | Rust |
| Blueprint-Blue (github.com/kwonus/blueprint-blue) ./Blueprint-Blue-Lib |
main | .Net 8 | C# |
| AV-Search (github.com/kwonus/AV-Search) | main | .Net 8 | C# |
| AV-Engine (github.com/kwonus/AV-Engine) | main | .Net 8 | C# |
| AV-Bible (github.com/kwonus/AV-Bible) | main | Windows (x64) / .Net 8 / WPF | C# |
| AV-Bible-Addin (github.com/kwonus/AV-Bible-Addin) identified in roadmap below as AV-Word |
main | Windows (x64) / .Net 4.x WPF / Office VSTO |
C# |
| AV-Data-Manager (github.com/kwonus/AV-Data-Manager) this is a helper application for AV-Bible-Addin |
main | Windows (x64) Native .Net 8 WPF | C# |
Figure 2: AVX-Framework input and output definition and repository details [rev #4C23]
AVX-Lib simplifies access to the Digital-AV SDK. The SDK provides NLP and linguistic features of the King James Bible. To be clear, the Digital-AV is what makes searches and rendering in the AVX-Framework, both feasible and fast. AVX-Lib is compiled with Dotnet 8. AVX-Lib leverages the latest "Omega" release of Digital-AV. The Omega release exposes the entire SDK in a single binary file that includes a built-in index/directory (the earlier "Z-Series" release of Digital-AV was far more cumbersome. There were numerous files and a lot more provisioning steps that were placed upon the consumer of the SDK). In short, AVX-Lib is a component of the Digital-AV SDK, and is designed specifically to simplify its use. To be clear, when we say "consumer", there is no implied cost. All components of the AVX Framework are as free as the gospel.
NUPhone is an MIT-licensed open source library. Its reference implementation, used here, is an in-process .NET 8 assembly. It emerged while Kevin was pursuing a masters in Computational Linguistics from the University of Washington (UW). In his coursework, he implemented a cross-lingual approximate string-matching algorithm between French text and English text. He called his comparison logic, "the heads & tails algorithm". It prioritized matching with a bias toward either the beginning string segment, or ending string segment. A close match guided the next comparison by aligning and prioritizing subsequent comparison logic. This approximate match logic allowed for slightly-differing Roman orthographies.
NUPhone formalizes that algorithm and simultaneously embraces uncertainty in its formalism. NUPhone is part acronym and part blend, It stands for "Normalized-Uncertainty Phoneme" representation. Like the heads & tails algorithm, NUPhone incorporates an abbreviated phonetic inventory. Yet, the NUPhone representation utilizes only 8-bits per phoneme. In general, that is more compact than ASCII, because many English phonemes are represented by more than a single character. Cooler still, those 8-bits represent a tiny coordinate system. Using this manner of representation, sound similarity can be efficiently calculated with Manhattan-Distance. Things couldn't be more intuitive. Phoneme embeddings in only 8-bits, coverage of the full phonetic inventory for English, and the efficiency of fuzzy-comparisons without the overhead of floating-point arithmetic!
Pinshot-Blue is an in-process Rust library with C-compatible FFI definitions. It is called by Blueprint-Blue using P/Invoke to perform the parse of a PEG grammar. The grammar itself is baked into Pinshot-Blue and implements the full specification of Quelle-AVX. Pinshot-Blue is a lean native library that does just one thing: it converts a Quelle command into a parse tree using the Pest crate. It returns the parse as text with the contents represented in JSON (a recursive representation of the parse).
Blueprint-Blue is an in-process .NET 8 assembly. It uses standard C# interfaces for parameters and the return types. However, the assembly also handles the P/Invoke calls into Pinshot-Blue. These two libraries work in tandem to produce the object model (aka blueprint) from the parse tree. AV-Engine is the consumer of Blueprint-Blue. Blueprint-Blue is in turn the consumer of Pinshot-Blue. These relationships are depicted in Figure 1. The OO model/blueprint is depicted in Figure 3-1. All green objects in the diagram relate to explicit Quelle commands. All purple objects in the diagram relate to implicit Quelle commands (search expressions are merely a component of an implicit Quelle command). All gray objects are neutral or shared.
Figure 3-1: Overview of the Blueprint-Blue object model (a framework that represents a Quelle parse)
The QFind object depicted above is almost a framework in itself. Figure 3-2 provides a detailed view of the QFind hierarchy. It should be noted that AV-Engine handles all Quelle commands except QFind [find expressions] without assistance from AV-Search. However, search expressions invoke methods in AV-Search and sport a leaner object model that better accommodates serialization for future web clients.
Figure 3-2: Detail of the QFind class of the Blueprint-Blue object model [rev #4111]
To summarize Figure 1, Blueprint-Blue converts the pinshot [parse tree] from Pinshot-Blue into a blueprint [object model]. This blueprint is handed off to AV-Search, which returns search results as represented by the purple boxes of Figure 3-3.
As seen in Figure 3-2, the QFind class inherits from SearchExpression. Most levels inherit from the result objects for easier interop between Blueprint-Blue and AV-Search with AV-Engine. The full QueryResult object hierarchy, depicted in Figure 3-3, streamlines rendering and highlighting operations for downstream clients of AV-Engine. All calls from AV-Engine to AV-Search are in-process. An earlier experiment, utilized a similar design that required serialization and native C++ code (It is unfinished, but available for review at github.com/AV-Text/AVX ). That experiment has been tabled for now in favor of a fully .NET 8 library stack.
Figure 3-3 reveals the entire QueryResult hierarchy. The purple objects offer both a summary of search results simultaneously with per-chapter results with metadata for highlighting and rendering. The Dark Gray box is not part of the Query itself; instead, it manages access to instantiated queries. The design is forward looking for when AV-Engine sits behind a REST service. The QueryManager is not currently implemented in the in-proc implementations.
Figure 3-3: QueryBook exposes summary information and hierarchical details for rendering & highlighting [rev #4106]
AV-Engine is an in-process .NET 8 assembly. It uses standard C# interfaces for parameters and the return types. Once a Quelle object model (aka blueprint) is obtained for the search from the Blueprint-Blue library, it is passed to AV-Search. Additional details about the object-model can be found in the Quelle-AVX specification.
AV-Console has been available since February 2024. This module is for testing. Its implementation is depicted in Figure 4-1.
Figure 4-1: Initial availability of AV-Console was in Q1/2024 [revision #4214; this console-app is a build-it-yourself release]
AV-Bible (Windows desktop [WPF] application) is available in the Microsoft Store. A refactored AV-Bible-2024 was released in experimental form in 2024 as an "XCOPY" installation. With minor documentation updates and an actual Windows installer, it was released as AV-Bible-2025 in January 2025. AV-Bible includes a fully functional implementation of AVX-Framework. AV-Word also saw a limited release in 2024, but it was released also in January 2025 as "AV-Bible Addin for Microsoft Word". Its installer is bundled with the AV-Bible 2025 release. Figure 4-2, identifies the roadmap of releases for CY2024.
Figure 4-2: Deployment Roadmap for AV-Bible and related artifacts in CY2024 [revision #5211]
Everything on the roadmap has been released.
AV-Bible is in the Microsoft Store. It is available here.
All source-code can be found at https://github.com/kwonus.
Your feedback on this framework is welcome! AVX Framework could easily become a great foundation for bible translators, especially for those whom are faithful to the KJV or Textus Receptus doctrines. Such an effort would require a team, instead of an individual. If you have a ministry that includes such a vision, please do not hesitate to reach out to me directly! I can easily be found on LinkedIn and/or Facebook. By all means, let's talk!
The Lord gave the word: great was the company of those that published it. -- Psalm 68:11