Formalizing editors and a step toward minting DOIs for Nomisma

As I reported in early October 2018, we made a huge improvement in Nomisma.org data provenance, connecting concepts to individuals who contributed to those concepts by means of manual editing or curation of spreadsheets uploaded into the system.

All of the editors within Nomisma have their own URIs, often connected to ORCID. We implemented two concept schemes to separate the id/ and the editor/ namespace. I have finally made some updates to the HTML serializations of the editor/ namespace page and each editor URI in order to provide greater context about a person's contributions to Nomisma.

Editor Concept Scheme page

The editor concept scheme page now contains a list of editors in Nomisma.org. These are the people who have contributed one way or another toward the creation of IDs, even if they are not among the few who have been granted authenticated access to the Nomisma back-end, for example, in the creation of IDs to support publication of type corpora (Gunnar Dumke, Oliver Hoover, Vladimir Stolba, and others). This table is generated by a simple SPARQL query that includes an optional skos:exactMatch that contains an ORCID. I hope to be able to extend the RDF for each editor to include their organization affiliation (seen in Kerameikos at http://kerameikos.org/editor/, which I copied and pasted over from one framework to another yesterday).

Editor pages

The editor pages are constructed by first submitting a SPARQL query to get a total count of IDs directly edited or contributed through spreadsheets. If the number is greater than 0, then two SPARQL queries are subsequently submitted to the Nomisma endpoint. One is to get a list of spreadsheets the editor has contributed to and the second is an abbreviated list of IDs associated with the editor. For example, I have contributed to about 2,500 Nomisma IDs, many of which have been through spreadsheet uploads (http://nomisma.org/editor/egruber). Lists in each category are downloadable, and you can even download the entire subset of Nomisma concepts associated with me in RDF/XML, Turtle, or JSON-LD (not that these subsets are particularly important or useful by themselves--you might as well download the entire Nomisma dataset from the links on the home page). However:

DataCite XML Metadata for DOIs

The chief aim here, which is why we have sought to connect these Nomisma editor URIs with ORCIDs, is to be able to mint DOIs for each person that redirect back to the editor URIs. Nomisma.org data constitute an enormous body of collective intellectual effort, and it's increasingly important that scholarly digital works receive equal weight as traditional publications. Therefore, the creation of DOIs for Nomisma contributions would appear in the scholarly profile in ORCID. Just recently, the AIA issued updated guidelines for the considerations of tenure and promotion, with specific guidelines for the recognition of digital projects, and so our goal of formalizing this recognition within Nomisma keeps us on the cutting edge with respect modern modes of scholarly communication.

At present, we are serializing RDF + SPARQL results into DataCite-compliant XML metadata, with the hope that we will be able to piggyback onto a partner institution's DataCite membership (at $2000/year, it is not justifiable for the American Numismatic Society to bear this cost). If this fails, I will rewrite my XSLT for Crossref (which now supports datasets), as the ANS is already a Crossref member, and has minted DOIs for electronic theses and dissertations and some other recent ebooks.