CEAlex excavation coins added to Ptolemaic Coins Online

Yesterday, the excavation database of Centre d'Études Alexandrines (CEAlex) was publicly launched, and today the relevant Linked Open Data has been imported into Nomisma.org. This new project currently includes the coins from the Cricket Ground excavations of Alexandria, which lasted from 1994-97. The nearly 300 coins published so far range in date from the Hellenistic period through Roman into Byzantine; more than 50 link to coin type URIs published in various platforms, primarily Ptolemaic Coins Online.

These excavation coins therefore enrich the research potential of PCO, providing findspots for dozens of coin types, which, in turn, expand the geographic visualization of related Nomisma.org concepts. You can learn more about the project by clicking the database link above.

CEAlex coin 3868 in Coins of the Ptolemaic Empire B196

Updated distribution map of Ptolemy II in Nomisma.org

158 Bactrian coins from the Dutch National Collection added to BIGR

Recently, Simon Glenn and Gunnar Dumke identified the Bactrian and Indo-Greek coins in the National Numismatic Collection of the Netherlands at De Nederlandsche Bank, linking them to URIs in the Bactrian and Indo-Greek Rulers (BIGR) project. These 158 new coins bring the total number of objects linked to the typology to 5,670, adding the sole photographic example for at least a handful of types.

Apollodotus II 17.3, with one NNC-DNB example: RE-00076

Greek Department updated in Mantis

 At long last, the Greek department at the American Numismatic Society (nearly 100,000 objects) has been migrated into CollectiveAccess and updated in our public database, Mantis. The coverage of people, political organizations, denominations, dynasties, etc. among Greek coinage has almost complete coverage in Nomisma.org, and the overall data quality, consistency, and completeness is greatly improved over the previous version of the data from the ANS's decades-old FileMaker database.

Almost 9,000 coins from this department have been linked to URIs published by RPC Online, which has enabled us to incorporate issuer URIs from RPC Online into Mantis, as well as fill gaps in cataloging, such has missing legends and type descriptions, which had not previously been inputted into FileMaker.

Due to the links from people to dynasties and political entities inherent in Nomisma.org linked data, we have been able to leverage these relationships and fill in missing fields, making it possible to search all coins of Parthia, even if only the ruler had previously been named on the coin.

One of the most important advances in data quality is the normalization of many findspots to places defined by Geonames, enabling the extraction of coordinates from Geonames for display in various map interfaces, either for the map showing the mint and findspot for a particular coin, or indexed in Solr for aggregate queries across the entire ANS collection. Over 150 coins in the Greek department are single finds or from excavations. Additionally, hoards are now indexed for query and geographic visualization. Several thousand Greek coins had references to Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards (IGCH) coin hoards which had not been successfully linked to URIs in Coinhoards.org, and so some gaps had been filled. Over 10,000 coins in the department (10% of the ANS's Greek collection) come from IGCH hoards and are therefore mappable in various user interfaces in Mantis. Mints, findspots, and hoards are all available in the Mantis maps interface, and can be refined by various faceted search queries. Point sizes vary based on density of coins related to those places.

Map depicting geographic distribution of Greek department

Some hundreds of Greek coins had previously slipped through the cracks in automated linking to Hellenistic Royal Coinages type URIs in the previous FileMaker-to-Mantis PHP script (due to typos or other inconsistencies that failed to match regular expressions). These have been identified and linked using OpenRefine.

After the republication of the newly-cleaned Greek and Roman departments to Mantis, the RDF export has been refreshed in Nomisma.org, adding several thousand new coins linked to type and coin hoard URIs, as well as propagating individual findspots into Hellenistic Royal Coinages, Online Coins of the Roman Empire, and Coinage of the Roman Republic Online. In total, more than 90,000 Greek and Roman coins have been ingested into the Nomisma SPARQL endpoint, an increase in more than 20,000 due to the integration of RPC Online URIs into our CollectiveAccess database. It should be noted that the RPC Online typology Linked Open Data have not been loaded into Nomisma, so it isn't possible to conduct sophisticated queries on Roman Provincial Coinage within the Nomisma LOD ecosystem (yet).

RIC Trajan 9 depicting findspots from Larnaca, Cyprus.

Aggregate distribution map of imperial coinage issued by Trajan (findspots from Portable Antiquities Scheme and the excavation of Larnaca, Cyprus)

Roman and Byzantine departments updated in Mantis

The next major wave of coins has been migrated from the ANS FileMaker database into the new curatorial database platform, CollectiveAccess. After several months of work in normalizing entities in OpenRefine, the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine departments (195,000 total objects) have been migrated into CollectiveAccess. The Byzantine and Roman coins have been published into the public database, Mantis, and the updated Greek department will be available online by tomorrow.

Altogether, more than 300,000 coins have been migrated into CollectiveAccess (roughly half the ANS collection), including the Islamic department (data cleaning undertaken by ANS contract cultural heritage data specialist Sami Norling) and the Medals and Decorations (which took me nearly six months to normalize nearly all of the artists, people depicted on coins, makers, issuers, etc.). Sami has subsequently finished cleaning the South Asian department, but it has not been uploaded into CollectiveAccess yet since I was busy with the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine objects.

This is a once-in-a-generation task, having inherited a database whose roots were in a bespoke MSDOS database from the 1980s. This database was imported into FileMaker in the late 1990s with no intermediate normalization or implementation of controlled vocabularies through relational database design.

When perusing the Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Medal, and Islamic departments in Mantis, the improvement in consistency and quality is readily apparent. This is especially true for the ancient and Byzantine coinage, since there is nearly complete coverage of numismatic concepts in Nomisma.org, including denominations, mints, regions, and people. Furthermore, nearly half of the Greek and Roman coins link to URIs published in online typologies, such as Online Coins of the Roman Empire and Hellenistic Royal Coinages. This had previously been the case in Mantis (which is one reason parts of the Roman and Greek collections were more consistent than others), but now we have linked tens of thousands of Roman Provincial Coins to URIs in RPC Online, thanks in large part to Jerome Mairat, who provided a concordance of ANS coins stored in their database. We did also link quite a few more that were not contained in the RPC Online database. In many cases, we were able to link to the issuer URI in RPC Online and make use of their preferred labels for individuals, thus greatly improving the human-readability of names in the issuer facet field.

Greek, Roman, and Byzantine findspots have been normalized to the best of my ability, and hoards have also been separated from the findspot field from FileMaker and normalized into controlled terms that can be used for query. The majority of ANS coins refer to hoards with IGCH URIs in CoinHoards.org, enhancing the map-based pages to show points on the query-able map for hoards as well as findspots, which were not geolocated in the previous iteration of data published in Mantis.

Mints and findspots of the Roman department, with finds from Britain to the Philippines

In addition to clear improvements in the controlled vocabulary terms in the search facets (authority, portrait, denomination, material, etc.), the indexing process pulls corporate entities and dynasties from Nomisma. Findspot and hoard are now search facets, making it possible to drill down specifically to coins from Boscoreale or other place. More than 140 Roman Republican coins now link to the Ancona 1 hoard in Kris Lockyear's Coin Hoards of Roman Republic, and points will appear on the map for these coins.

ANS 1944.100.238 from CHRR AN1

After the Greek department is published to Mantis, then I will reactivate the nightly updates. Unlike the FileMaker editing workflow, the modern APIs in CollectiveAccess enable us to run nightly updates of any object edited the previous workday, which significantly reduces the waiting time between the editing and publication of objects online. This has been a major logjam in the publication workflow since my arrival at the ANS in 2011.

Roman Imperial persons augmented with roles, dates, and dynasties

At long last, our spreadsheet of people associated with Roman Imperial Coinage (emperors, empresses and other family members, etc.) has gone live in Nomisma.org. The Roman emperors, which are among the first IDs ever created in Nomisma in 2012 or before for the Online Coins of the Roman Empire project, have now been brought up to the standard model we later implemented for Greek, Roman Republican, and other persons. This entails:

• Creating about a dozen dynasty URIs in Nomisma and linking persons to them, when applicable (see http://nomisma.org/id/severan_dynasty).
• Creating a small handful of foaf:Organization URIs that represent some breakaway kingdoms, such as the Gallic Empire.
• Adding proper start and end dates for the roles individuals played with respect to their reigns. 
• Added birth and death dates, when known.

After establishing links between people and dynasties and corporate entities, the associated dynasty/organization Nomisma page is augmented with additional research context, such as lists of typologies and maps showing the distribution of mints, hoards, and findspots.

Nomisma page for the Gallic Empire

 

This additional structure will also enhance OCRE, enabling us to index dynasties and organizations for faceted search.

Not only that, but as the American Numismatic Society nears completion of the migration of the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine departments into a new curatorial database system on the CollectiveAccess platform, we will be able to incorporate these new entities into the CollectiveAccess database, and therefore will improve the quality and consistency of data presented in Mantis, our public database of coins.

The Medals and Islamic departments have already been migrated to CollectiveAccess with significantly improved quality by linking to Nomisma.org, Wikidata, and Geonames to standardize personal, organizational, and geographic names. I will write more on that subject later.

Corpus Nummorum integrated into Nomisma.org

At the European Coin Find Network / Nomisma.org meeting several weeks ago in Sofia, Bulgaria, I learned that Corpus Nummorum had a SPARQL endpoint. However, it is an endpoint that supports only the query protocol without a UI wrapper to make it more publicly usable. Sitting in the conference auditorium, I used the Nomisma SPARQL endpoint to execute the SERVICE protocol in order to query the CN endpoint. This revealed a triplestore that contains both types and coins, almost entirely conformant to the Nomisma.org data model (there are some variations to model bibliographic references or source collections). However, federated queries are relatively slow. Upon arriving back home, I spun up a simple SPARQL UI wrapper (which functions exactly like Nomisma), that I had originally built as an interface on top of the old defunct British Museum RDF export Matt Lincoln had squirreled away. This UI wrapper works on any SPARQL 1.1-compliant endpoint, whether it was running on my locally installed instance of Fuseki or any accessible endpoint on the web (as is the case with Corpus Nummorum).

Corpus Nummorum SPARQL results in a GUI

After exploring the type and coin data a bit further, I created two SPARQL queries that implement CONSTRUCT to generate RDF/XML exports, one for types and the other for coins. I created an XSLT identity transform to slightly modify the structure of the RDF I extracted from the endpoint so that it would validate in the Nomisma RDF import system. I also replaced the static image URLs from the Bibliothèque nationale de France and American Numismatic Society with IIIF service URIs.

Most of the coins have images, although a significant number of examples in CN are photographs of plaster casts rather than the original object. The plaster cast photographs are modeled slightly differently in the RDF than our standard model, and I did not modify my SPARQL query to acquire these image links in the data I uploaded into Nomisma. Nor, at present, have I incorporated the plaster cast photos in the model CN developed, as the SPARQL queries for displaying images in Nomisma would have to be updated (and possibly also some code).

As far as I can tell though, the die axes, weights, and diameters for the coins represented by plaster casts measure the original metallic object, and are therefore accurate numbers to use for statistical analysis.

Enhancing Research Context within Nomisma.org

Much like the recent integration of IRIS types into the Nomisma.org LOD ecosytem, the upload of more than 11,000 coin types and 28,000 specimens from Corpus Nummorum fills in a sizeable gap in the context pertaining to individual Nomisma concepts related to the coinage of Thrace and the surrounding regions of Moesia Inferior, as well as Troas and Mysia in Anatolia. Most broadly, the Nomisma ID for Thrace is augmented with a paginated list of over 10,000 coin types, many of which are illustrated by at least one specimen, ranging from Greek types from Corpus Nummorum to Roman Imperial types in OCRE.

Drilling down into narrower concepts, such as mints or authorities, reveals more refined visualizations. The Kingdom of Odrysian Thrace produced 66 types from the mid-5th to early 2nd century BC, although only about 20% are attributed to two certain mints.

The map and types of Odrysian Thrace

 

 

Some Caveats

Aside from the aforementioned lack of photographs of plaster casts, the Corpus Nummorum dataset includes some duplication of both types and coins that we should be aware about. Since the CN typology runs the gamut of coinages produced in Thrace and nearby regions throughout the duration of antiquity, there is some overlap between these types and other corpora, including Hellenistic Royal Coinages and Roman Provincial Coinage Online. CN types don't like to these other URIs, or vice versa, so queries may duplicate statistics from the same object. Similarly, since the CN database records all specimens internally rather than linking to external collections, coins from Nomisma partners that are already linked to HRC types that overlap with CN have also been duplicated in the CN export. The long-term solution here is for Nomisma partners to catalog their own collections with CN type URIs and then weed these items out of the Corpus Nummorum export. The canonical URI for a coin should be published by the holding institution rather than independent research datasets.

 

Duplicative types minted in Aenus and coins between CN and Seleucid Coins Online

There are about 500 coins from the ANS that have been given CN object URIs that are now available through Nomisma, but actually relatively few of these are duplicative of the coins the ANS has exported to Nomisma through links to HRC type URIs. However, we should incorporate CN URIs for non-Royal coinages into our own database so that we can export them directly. The same should apply for collections in Berlin's IKMK network.

Greek types from IRIS integrated into Nomisma

A few weeks ago during the Hackathon Athens at the French School, nearly 13,000 coin types from IRIS (IDs Recorded In Skeleton) were loaded into the Nomisma.org SPARQL endpoint. These types are now available alongside those published by the American Numismatic Society's Hellenistic Royal Coinages project, making it possible to query and visualize data across a broader spectrum of Greek royal and civic coinages. Although the IRIS types are not as completely detailed as those from other projects (containing obverse and reverse type descriptions and legends, material, authority, mint, region, and issue dates but notably not denominations or portraits/deities), it is still possible to list these civic coinages in the example types for authorities and mints within the Nomisma.org interface.

See for example, the URI for the Achaemenid Empire:

The Nomisma page for the Achaemenid Empire

This is an excellent illustration of a significant body of types enhancing the research context of a political entity. Previously, this map would have shown IGCH coin hoards that were linked to Achaemenid rulers, but the authorities, whether dynasts themselves or satraps issuing in the name of the dynasty are linked to both mints and the Achaemenid Empire Nomisma concept. The map now displays the geographic distribution of the production of Achaemenid coinage, centered primarily in Anatolia, but also extending into the Levant and a single issue in Babylon.

There is a list of nearly 300 total types related to this political entity, ordered chronologically and linked to IRIS. The types are downloadable as CSV directly from the Nomisma SPARQL endpoint.

Eventually, the coins from the Bibliothèque nationale de France that are linked to IRIS will be merged into the exports that have been linked into other Nomisma-affiliated projects, and examples from the BnF and other institutions that begin to catalog with IRIS URIs will begin to populate the tables on Nomisma pages to illustrate the types.