Thursday, March 22, 2012

Numismatic Description Standard: A Draft

A number of blog posts have mentioned NUDS-XML, our approach to interpreting the Numismatic Database Standard fields listed by Sebastian Heath on nomisma.org as an XML data model.  NUDS-XML (which could be called "Numismatic Description Standard" since it is not technically a database schema) is an ontology applied to numismatic metadata, influenced by existing metadata standards like EAD, METS, and VRA Core, but also largely reliant on linked open data philosophies.  Many numismatic concepts can be linked to resources on nomisma.org through W3C xlink attributes.

While NUDS is still a draft and has not been codified in the form of XSD or Relax NG schemas, it is stable enough for development.  Numishare is designed to create, edit, and publish NUDS records for physical coins and conceptual coin-type objects.

Draft documentation for NUDS is now available through the ANS's wiki.

http://wiki.numismatics.org/nuds:nuds

Linking Roman Coins: Current Work at the American Numismatic Society

Several of the American Numismatic Society's current projects are going to be demonstrated at CAA 2012, to be held in Southampton, England next week.  CAA, Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology, is an interesting conferences that draws as many archaeologists as computer and information scientists, including many alt-ac people like myself who are a hybrid of the two fields.

Below is one of the slideshows that we will be presenting.


It introduces nomisma.org and details our use of NUDS-XML and Numishare to create an open-access web-based version of Roman Imperial Coinage.  The demo is available at http://admin.numismatics.org/ocre.