New and Improved Nomisma.org Released

Today we have released the new and improved Nomisma.org.  There have been some updates to fix consistency problems in the data.  One of the major improvements is the importation of multilingual labels pulled from dbpedia through the XForms-based editing interface (I'll write up a blog post to discuss the Nomisma back-end eventually, and probably write up something more detailed for publication in code4lib or CAA).  In addition to data improvements, we have introduced some major new functionalities:

 SPARQL endpoint (http://nomisma.org/sparql)

 The new Nomisma server employs an RDF triplestore and SPARQL endpoint based on Apache Fuseki.  The endpoint is detailed in an older post, "How to Participate in OCRE."  Instead of launching a triplestore specifically for OCRE, we have launched it more generally for Nomisma.  Therefore, we can insert into it RDF describing non-Roman imperial coins.  OCRE, then, queries the Nomisma triplestore to power its mapping, quantitative analysis, and thumbnail-displaying capabilities.  When we release the new linked data-aware OCRE (which will contain all RIC types through Commodus) within the next few weeks, I'll provide a more detailed blog post about how OCRE functions.

The Nomisma SPARQL page, linked above, contains a number of query examples to get you started.  For example, you can get the average weight of RIC Augustus 1a with the following query:

PREFIX rdf:      <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
PREFIX dcterms:  <http://purl.org/dc/terms/>
PREFIX nm:    <http://nomisma.org/id/>
PREFIX xs:    <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#>
SELECT (AVG(xs:decimal(?weight)) AS ?average)
WHERE {
?g nm:type_series_item <http://numismatics.org/ocre/id/ric.1(2).aug.1a>.
?g nm:weight ?weight
}

Or get all findspots for the type coin type:

PREFIX rdf:      <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
PREFIX dcterms:  <http://purl.org/dc/terms/>
PREFIX nm:       <http://nomisma.org/id/>
PREFIX skos:      <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#>
PREFIX geo: <http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#>
SELECT ?object ?findspot ?lat ?long ?title ?prefLabel WHERE {
?object nm:type_series_item <http://numismatics.org/ocre/id/ric.1(2).aug.1a> .
?object nm:findspot ?findspot .
?findspot geo:lat ?lat .
?findspot geo:long ?long .
OPTIONAL {?object skos:prefLabel ?prefLabel}
OPTIONAL {?object dcterms:title ?title}
}

APIs (http://nomisma.org/apis)

We have introduced, so far, a small handful of APIs to expedite certain common SPARQL queries, for example, getting the average weight, diameter, or axis of a particular typology or get the closing date of a hoard given a selection of coin types.  One may also get a list of RDF representations of Nomisma IDs or NUDS documents representing coin types defined by Nomisma in one aggregated serialization.  These APIs expedite the data-loading processes in CHRR and other Numishare-based projects.

Flickr Machine Tags (http://nomisma.org/flickr)

Although not exactly a function of Nomisma, we encourage the use of machine tags in flickr to associate photographs with numismatic concepts defined by Nomisma.  We have documented this methodology in the link above.