New version of Mantis released

Following the migration of Numishare's public user interface from Apache Cocoon to Orbeon, the American Numismatic Society's collection database, Mantis, has now been updated and deployed into production. The new version of Mantis take advantage of new user interface developments incorporated into Numishare since the winter--namely HTML5 + Bootstrap 3, which makes the site work equally well on mobile devices as desktops and laptops.

While much of the functionality has remained the same despite the noticeable visual facelift, the migration to Orbeon has enabled some new data export features, which follow advances in modern web publishing frameworks. Data are available in Turtle and JSON-LD in addition to RDF/XML. These serializations are available through REST URIs. They are also accessible via content negotiation, made possible by Orbeon's XML Pipeline Language (XPL). I won't go into further detail, as I already discussed this in a previous blog post. However, Mantis now has an APIs page with documentation on how to access data (as do all other Numishare projects). I plan to improve this documentation in the near future to include more information about our Solr schema and fields available for query, including some pretty advanced examples.

Over the last week, I migrated Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic, OCRE, and AoD to the Orbeon-based Numishare in production. I am pleased to announce that I have deleted Cocoon 2.1.11 from Tomcat on the server. It has served me well as a [mostly] XML developer since 2007, but it's time to move on.

New Emperors Added to OCRE

We have added more than 1,300 new coin types from Gordian III to Trajan Decius into OCRE. We have now surpassed 20,000 types, and are at least half-way finished the publication process.

The British Museum and American Numismatic Society coins from this period have been re-processed and added into the Nomisma RDF triplestore. The University of Virginia coins will be republished momentarily, giving the project a few dozen more coins from published British coin hoards. At present, there are more than 14,000 physical specimens from the ANS and nearly 13,000 coins from the BM accessible through OCRE.

Many of the BM coins from this lot have findspots (many found in hoards excavated in Britain over the last 30-40 years, e.g., http://numismatics.org/ocre/id/ric.4.gor_iii.6), but unforunately the findspots data in the British Museum's SPARQL endpoint do not contain machine readable geographic coordinates. Hopefully the BM data may be enhanced to improve the geographic usefulness in OCRE eventually.