Leveraging nomisma to Deliver Controlled Vocabulary Services

With the launch of the nomisma.org Atom feed just a few days ago, I went to work on developing an XForms component which leverages the service to deliver controlled vocabulary terms for ancient mints within the administrative backend of Numishare. Numishare's interface for creating and editing coins already included a connector to geonames.org's APIs for querying modern place names, which I have detailed on the EADitor blog.

The nomisma service operates in similar fashion. A user selects a "nomisma" radio button (versus the other options to query geonames or local controlled vocabulary stored in the Solr index), inputs a search term into a text box, clicks the search button which executes an xforms:submission to query the Atom feed (which populates an xforms:instance), and selects the appropriate option from the select list box, which is formed by each atom:entry returned by the query. An example is pictured below:


The nomisma URI is stored as an attribute in the mint element in the NUDS-XML record so that, upon indexing the record into the search index, a lookup is performed on the RDFa of the nomisma id to extract geographic coordinates, enabling mapping out of the box of ancient mints (in addition to modern mints that are supplied through the geonames service). As noted earlier, findspots are also mappable.


Additionally, if the nomisma RDFa includes a reference to the associated Pleiades place, the Pleiades URI is also stored in the search index, enabling querying of Numishare by that URI.

Code for XForms XBL component