Developing Conceptual Glossaries for the Latin Vulgate Bible

A conceptual glossary is a textual reference work that combines the features of a thesaurus and an index verborum. In it, the word occurrences within a given text are classified, disambiguated, and indexed according to their membership of a set of conceptual (i.e. semantic) fields. Since 1994, we have been working towards building a set of conceptual glossaries for the Latin Vulgate Bible. So far, we have published a conceptual glossary to the Gospel according to John and are presently completing the analysis of the Gospel according to Mark and the minor epistles. This paper describes the background to our project and outlines the steps by which the glossaries are developed within a relational database framework.