The Logos 5 Topic Guide

Since the introduction of Logos 4, we’ve been developing an infrastructure for intelligent topical searching that’s now starting to pay off in Logos 5’s powerful, easy-to-use features. The foremost of these is the new Topic Guide.

Open a Topic Guide from the Guides menu and start entering your topic and you’ll notice that Logos gives you suggestions from the Logos Controlled Vocabulary (LCV).

LCV is the backbone of our topical infrastructure and the basis of the Topic Guide, which brings together dictionary and encyclopedia articles, Bible references, synonyms, related concepts, and more. First of all, the Topic Guide uses LCV to resolve synonyms when you enter your topic—if you enter “Simon,” it suggests Peter (or lets you select one of the other Simons from the Bible).

The Topic Guide uses LCV to find articles about your topic, related Bible verses, media, and biblical people, places, things, and events. It also gives you links to other related topics and searches.

The Topic Guide is limited to topics that are contained in the LCV, and you’ll find that you get the best results for topics explicitly mentioned by name in the Bible, but we’re continually working on building LCV—aligning more reference works, adding concepts, and improving and refining the data in other ways—so the results are going to keep improving over time.

In particular, the Catholic content we’ve been able to add to our library in recent years will be leading to improved coverage of both Catholic reference works in the Verbum libraries and topics that are of particular interest to Catholics.