Friday, August 29, 2014

Report from SemTechBiz + Getty TGN in nomisma.org

I spent last week in San Jose, attending the Semantic Technology and Business conference, where I participated in a LODLAM-sponsored workshop aimed at providing an introduction to linked open data technologies to a library, archive, and museum audience.

I was asked to provide a somewhat hands-on demo of SPARQL. My presentation, from 0 to 60 on SPARQL queries in 50 minutes provided a brief outline of the sorts of linked data methodologies we're employing in our numismatic projects--particularly nomisma.org and OCRE--and the SPARQL queries that make them possible. I started fairly simply and built up to more complex queries of weight analysis and geographic distribution of coin types. By downloading SPARQL queries with geographic data as a CSV file from the nomisma.org endpoint, I was able to import the CSV directly into Google Fusion tables to generate maps. I have placed the content of the slideshow up on Dropbox as a PDF.

The audience consisted mainly of cultural heritage professionals, although there were some industry professionals in attendance. The feedback I received was positive overall (judging by the Twitter stream, in any case), but I did receive comment about the model and ontology (or lack thereof) that we have employed in nomisma.org. Rest assured that we are working on a formal ontology and refined data model that conforms to data/computer science standards. No more URIs used simultaneously as classes, properties, and instances!

On another note, the Getty Museum announced last week the release of their Thesaurus of Geographic Names as linked open data (following the Art and Architecture Thesaurus). I have extended the nomisma editing interface (as well as the Kerameikos.org one) to enable Getty TGN lookups for mints and regions in order to link nomisma ids with Getty ones. Through this mechanism, we can establish links between Pleiades and TGN places, although there are certainly more ancient places in Pleiades than in nomisma, which are purely numismatic.


The text search yields a response of matches from the Getty SPARQL endpoint. The user can read the scope note for further context about the use of the TGN id and make the appropriate selection of skos:exactMatch or skos:relatedMatch.

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