British Museum Coins in OCRE

With many thanks to Eleanor Ghey in the British Museum Coins & Medals department for providing spreadsheet dumps of the BM's imperial coins from Augustus through the end of RIC Volume 4, I was able to match more than 11,000 coins from Augustus to Elegabalus to URIs defining Roman imperial coin types in OCRE. After these matches were made, another script queried the British Museum's SPARQL endpoint to generate a large RDF file conforming to nomisma.org's model. Most coins include die axis, weight, and diameter. Many (if not most) also include links to images. These measurements are now available for the quantitative analysis feature in Numishare, resulting in generally more accurate queries.

There are now roughly 20,000 coins hooked into OCRE from four collections: the ANS, British Museum, Berlin, and the University of Virginia Art Museum. We do expect to incorporate larger numbers from Berlin and the Bibliothèque Nationale in the future, as well as from some large scale finds databases like the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the European Coin Find Network. The floodgates will soon open in providing data and research tools to a wide audience of students, scholars, and generally interested parties to visualization information and ask questions of the data that were not previously possible.

Caracalla through Elagabalus published to OCRE

All of the types from Caracalla through Elagabalus have been published to OCRE. Additionally, the University of Virginia Art Museum collection has been re-published into the nomisma.org triplestore. The number is small, but there are four coins in this batch from UVA (see http://numismatics.org/ocre/id/ric.4.el.132 for example). So far, there is no coverage from the ANS collection, but we hope to make these coins available in OCRE by the end of next week.  Additionally, I expect to have most or all of the imperial coins from the British Museum available in OCRE tomorrow or Monday.

ANS and ISAW Receive Major NEH Grant to Complete OCRE

The American Numismatic Society and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World receive a major grant from the NEH

The American Numismatic Society(ANS) and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World(ISAW) are delighted to announce the receipt of a major grant of $300,000 from the Division of Preservation and Access of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant, made as part of the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program, will provide for the full implementation of the Online Coins of the Roman Empire(OCRE) project.

Co-directed by Dr. Andrew Meadows of the ANS and Professor Roger Bagnall of ISAW and managed by Dr. Gilles Bransbourg, OCRE is a ground breaking initiative to create an online reference and cataloguing tool for coinage of the Roman Empire. Through its use of a Linked Open Data model, OCRE will provide full descriptions and illustrations of the 45,000 different types of Roman Imperial Coinage, as well as providing a union catalogue of specimens held in major collections.  Currently the collections at the ANS in New York, the Bode Museum in Berlin and the University of Virginia Art Museum are included. It is hoped over the lifetime of the project to add the collections of the British Museum in London and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, as well as other collections as they become available online. 

Within three years, OCRE will also begin to include coin find information from the UK’s Portable Antiquities Scheme and the European Coin Finds Network. OCRE will additionally provide tools to chart the distribution of coin types, and to analyze metrological, stylistic, and typological data on the basis of coins included in the union catalogue.  The OCRE interface is currently fully searchable in eleven languages, rising to twenty over the course of the project.

Through its Linked Data approach, the OCRE project is designed to interact fully with other such initiatives being developed for the Ancient World, including ISAWs existing Pleiades project (http://pleiades.stoa.org), a joint ANS London Institute of Archaeology project to catalogue Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic (http://www.numismatics.org/chrr/), a joint ANS British Museum project to establish a type catalogue of Roman Republican Coinage and Oxford University’s Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire project (http://oxrep.classics.ox.ac.uk/coin_hoards_of_the_roman_empire_project/)

Executive Director of the ANS, Dr. Ute Wartenberg, commented. “The award of this major grant is exciting for the ANS and pays tribute to the hard work and technical skill of the staff involved in the planning of the foundation stage of the project. We also owe a major debt to donors and members of the Society who have supported the project to this point.”

Dr. Bransbourg will give a presentation on the project at the 39th Chicago International Coin Fair in Rosemont, Illinois, on Friday, April 11th, 2014 in the Kennedy Room, during an ANS reception taking place at 5:45 pm through 7:45 pm. He is also available for interview on +1(212)571-4470 ext. 156, or alternatively on +1(347)622-0106.

For more information contact Joanne Isaac at +1(212)571-4470 ext. 112 or isaac@numismatics.org

The American Numismatic Society, organized in 1858 and incorporated in 1865 in New York State, operates as a research museum under Section 501 (c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and is recognized as a publicly supported organization under section 170 (b)(1)(A)(vi) as confirmed on November 1, 1970.  

University College Dublin Classical Museum Joins Nomisma.org Consortium

Recapping a post on the Day of DH blog: today I received an RDF dump conforming to the nomisma.org data model of the Republican coins in the University College Dublin Classical Museum. I have pushed this into the nomisma triplestore, and now they are available for query through the endpoint--and will be available for wider access and scholarly research through RRC Online, a joint ANS-British Museum project to digitally publish Michael Crawford's type corpus, Roman Republican Coinage. RRC Online is modeled after OCRE and will be publicly available within the next one or two months.

The UCD coins are encoded natively in NUDS, and XML schema for encoding numismatic data. I have been developing the schema for years, and UCD's adoption of it represents the first external use of the emerging standard (it is used by the University of Virginia collection, but I had involvement in the publication of that collection.