Updating MANTIS and IGCH: Incorporating further context into our collection

For the first time, I am faced with a decision whether to post an update on the Numishare blog or XForms for Archives, my other blog for EADitor, xEAC, ETDPub, and our specific implementations of these frameworks within the American Numismatic Society.

I have been working significantly over the last few weeks in overhauling our infrastructure to interlink our projects more thoroughly. I have posted in the past about publishing our archival authorities and collections into a SPARQL endpoint in order to make these systems more interoperable. I extended this system so that our Digital Library publications would go into this endpoint as well, so that we can make our publications and archival materials available through our EAC-CPF collection (and vice versa). Last week, I re-wrote the TEI->RDF transformation in EADitor (for collections of facsimile images) to conform to the same Open Annotation model that I implemented for TEI EBooks published in the Digital Library.

This opened the door for specific mentions of coins, hoards, and other entities defined by URIs in Edward Newell's research notebooks to be made available in other systems, namely, in IGCH itself and through MANTIS.

For example, IGCH 1508 now contains two annotations for our library or archival materials--from Noe's recently published EBook Numismatic Notes and Monographs 1: Coin Hoards and one of Newell's research notebooks. It is possible to click on a link for any mention of these hoards on any page of the notebook or section of an EBook. Furthermore, IGCH has been extended further to display a list of coin types that appear in a hoard, with examples of coins (from PELLA). It is possible to download either all types or all coins from a hoard from the Nomisma.org SPARQL endpoint. See http://coinhoards.org/id/igch1399 for example.

The same basic code applies in MANTIS. Broadly speaking, Numishare has been updated so that it may read Open Annotations from an optional archival SPARQL endpoint (in this case, the endpoint is for Archer). It will display a link to a page or section that mentions a particular object in the ANS collection.

• A coin mentioned in a Newell notebook
• A medal mentioned in Miller's Medallic Arts of the American Numismatic Society 

I will be discussing the integration of these frameworks into a cohesive Library, Archive, and Museum linked data infrastructure at CAA in Oslo in several weeks.

Excavation coins from Priene available in OCRE

The Berlin Münzkabinett is setting up a new database for coin finds from German excavations of Priene:

This database includes the coins of the excavations since 1998 (Museum Balat) and the old excavations of the Berlin Museums (Münzkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). By Bernhard Weisser and Johannes Eberhardt (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) in cooperation with the German Archaeological Institute and the universities in Frankfurt (Wulf Raeck, Axel Filges), Bonn (Frank Rumscheid) and Bursa (Hakan Mert). IT: Jürgen Freundel, Editor: Karsten Dahmen.

So far there are two coins connected to currently published RIC types in OCRE (as a proof of concept), but more coins will be published eventually. The associated types are:

• http://numismatics.org/ocre/id/ric.5.cg.98
• http://numismatics.org/ocre/id/ric.5.gall(2).574

Since the two coins connected to these types have findspots, Priene will appear as a findspot on the map in OCRE. Additionally, with the more advanced mapping features recently introduced on Nomisma.org, the Priene findspot will appear on any map associated with any individual skos:Concepts connected to these coin types, e.g., Claudius Gothicus (http://nomisma.org/id/claudius_ii_gothicus), whose map shows a findspot for Priene and two hoards in Britain--Normanby and Oliver's Orchard Hoards--connected to coins from the University of Virginia.

Nomisma's new interface upgrades will be discussed in further detail in another blog post.