I’m extremely excited right now – we just hit a HUGE milestone!

We have just added ShabadID to GurbaniDB, marking the first time in Sikh history that data of the hymns within the Sikh Scriptures has been open sourced for developers worldwide to use freely. This also now makes GurbaniDB complete as a database.

We have had many requests from developers to incorporate this data, and even me myself wanted to see this for a long time. However it has all been thanks to the contribution of Harvinder Singh from khojgurbani.org that this has now been made available.

I spent an entire day to ensure that the data was of high quality, accurate and complete – which to my delight – I found it was. I then modified the data to package it within the existing GurbaniDB ecosystem.

For those of you already using an existing version of GurbaniDB to power your app, I would encourage you to upgrade right away. The only changed table is tblscripture which you will find within gurbanidb_core.sql, and the only addition is a new column which we have called ShabadID that ranges from 1 to 3620.

We have also taken a unique approach to categorising Shabads, compared to other Gurbani websites, by categorising them within context by including the Shaloks and Pauris related to a Shabad so that a reader can understand the full context of a hymn.

At the moment, we have not incorporated this Shabad data into the GurbaniDB search engine, and most likely we will not do this as we are in the process of creating a better, more open API for developers to use and are planning to retire our search engine shortly.

So lets take some time to celebrate this success which will no doubt help developers build better Gurbani applications now and in the future.

In humble service to you,

Jasdeep HBS Khalsa

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 20th, 2013 at 11:17 am and is filed under Announcements, GurbaniDB. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.