Andrew Meadows, Karsten Tolle, and David Wigg-Wolf invite participants for a roundtable on numismatic data standards and exchange, to be held at the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA) conference (http://caa2014.sciencesconf.org/), Paris, 22-25 April 2014.
Coins survive in vast numbers
from many historical periods and cultures, providing important
evidence for a wide variety of social, political and economic aspects
of those cultures. But currently these data are only potentially
available, as differing national traditions have yet to integrate
their substantial datasets on the basis of shared vocabularies,
syntax and structure.
Building on the experience with
Linked Data of projects such as nomisma.org, the European Coin Find
Network (ECFN: http://www.ecfn.fundmuenzen.eu/Home.html) and Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE: http://numismatics.org/ocre/), the
roundtable will provide a forum for the presentation and discussion
of (meta)data standards and ontologies for data repositories
containing information on coins, with a view to advancing the
possibilities of data exchange and facilitating access to data across
a range of repositories. The round table follows on from the two
joint meetings of nomisma.org and ECFN, which concentrated on
ancient, primarily Roman coins, held in Frankfurt, Germany in May
2012; and Carnuntum, Austria in April 2013, which was attended by 25
participants from 10 European countries and the USA. The round table
is intended to encourage discussion among a wider community, beyond
that of ancient numismatics, drawing together lessons from a broader
range of projects, and embedding the results in the more general
landscape of cultural heritage data management. Too often in the past
numismatists have allowed themselves to operate in isolation from
other related disciplines, including archaeology, a deficit that this
session also aims to address.
Although the core data required
to identify and describe coins of almost all periods are relatively
simple (e.g. issuer, mint, date, denomination, material, weight,
size, description of obverse and reverse, etc.), and this can result
in a significant degree of correlation between the structure of
different repositories, linking disparate numismatics repositories
presents a number of problems. Nevertheless, coins provide an ideal
test bed for the implementation of concepts such as Linked Data and
the creation of standardised thesauri, the lessons of which can be
profitably applied to other, more complex fields. Organizers:
Dr Andrew Meadows
Deputy Director
American
Numismatic Society
Dr Karsten Tolle
DBIS
Goethe University
Dr David Wigg-Wolf
Römisch-Germanische
Kommission des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts
