Updates and NUDS XSD Schema

At long last, I have made significant updates to the Numismatic Description Schema (NUDS) XSD file, which has been hosted on Github for quite some time. From the documentation:

The Numismatic Description Schema is a codified XML schema based on numismatic database fields proposed by Sebastian Heath and Andrew Meadows. These fields, called the Numismatic Description Standard, are detailed at http://www.greekcoinage.org/nuds.html, and were originally published on Nomisma.org. The NUDS XML schema is based on this field list and Ethan Gruber's preliminary work mapping coins to Encoded Archival Description, which was detailed in a 2009 Computer Applications in Archaeology paper, "Encoded Archival Description for Numismatic Collections". It is also influenced by the structure of TEI and EAC-CPF, common standards in the Digital Humanities, library, and archival domains. Ideally, a NUDS record should implement XLink attributes to integrate URIs from external Linked Open Data vocabulary systems, such as concepts defined on Nomisma.org itself.

The updates have been undertaken to make NUDS more flexible for the encoding of seals for a project overseen by Charlotte Roueche at King's College London. These improvements include documenting every element and attribute in the schema, and enabling the namespacing of EpiDoc TEI into the nuds:description for enhanced prose markup and the nuds:legend for more sophisticated annotation of inscriptions. The Numishare codebase will be extended to include EpiDoc XSLT templates for rendering TEI in the applicable NUDS elements.

Since its inception in summer 2011, the NUDS XML namespace has pointed to http://nomisma.org/nuds, which was never a dereferenceable page. It is now--it is the XSD schema transformed through XSLT into an HTML tag library with usage examples (I am still working on adding these examples).

The XSD is available directly at http://nomisma.org/nuds.xsd, which can be considered a stable URL, and may be used for validation of XML files.

Roman coins from the Metropolitan Museum of Art enter Nomisma

The Met Museum is the latest institution to be integrated into the Linked Ancient World Data Initiative, following their major announcement last week concerning the release of more than 375,000 images into the public domain and the publication of a dump of their data into a massive CSV file.

Aureus of Julius Caesar in CRRO

I almost immediately got to work on parsing this CSV in order to link their coins to Online Coins of the Roman Empire and Coinage of the Roman Republic Online, but found that the dumps did not include full type references to RIC or RRC, nor did I find a clear way of extracting images from the database for re-use. With many thanks to curator Christopher Lightfoot for providing a concordance between the Met's coins and reference numbers and Ben Rasmusen for some tips on interacting with the Met's not-yet-published 'additionalImages' web service, I wrote a simple PHP script to generate Nomisma-compliant RDF. I have just ingested this into Nomisma's SPARQL endpoint. About 60 coins have been positively linked to URIs in CRRO and OCRE. Furthermore, these coins will be integrated into the Pelagios Project by means of the Nomisma->Pelagios export feature.

You can see examples of three aurei of Julius Caesar (RRC 466/1) from the Met along with examples of the same type from six other museums. You can get a concordance list of Met and coin type URIs back out of the SPARQL endpoint with the following query: https://gist.github.com/ewg118/f9c8bae782fdc841af6c7aca782ef06d.

OCRE surpasses 100,000 physical specimens, including Polish coin finds, and more

We have several additional news events to report:

1. We have finally published the Roman coins from the American Numismatic Society with references to RIC 9 to Online Coins of the Roman Empire. This has brought us to a milestone 100,000 physical specimens linked to about 42,000 imperial types spanning five centuries from Augustus to Zeno.
2. We have reprocessed our data from RIC 4 in order to represent the type-subtype hierarchy within that volume more accurately. Some data errors have been fixed due PHP processing glitches or typos in deity names.
3. More than 7,200 coins in the Finds of Roman Coins in Poland project (part of the European Coin Find Network umbrella) have been ingested into Nomisma.org for query and visualization. Of these coins, 23 are linked to URIs defined by OCRE.
4. I discovered a glitch in my script for mapping references to Price (1991) to IDs in Pella, and now about 500 coins in the ANS of Philip III and Lysimachus have been added into Pella.
5. Berlin has added an export for Macedonian coins found in the excavations of Priene, and two have been added into Pella.

OCRE has eclipsed 100,000 coins, but our total between this, CRRO, Pella, and AoD stands at about 153,000.

Harvard Art Museums coins reprocessed, added as IIIF contributors

Harvard Art Museums is one of three contributors of coins to Nomisma.org, providing data and images for all three of our major coin type projects: OCRE, CRRO, and Pella. They are also one of our few partners providing images according to IIIF image API specifications. Following the application of the Europeana Data Model specs for IIIF integration for Rutgers' entry into Nomisma.org, I have updated my script for harvesting numismatic content from Harvard to include IIIF manifest metadata.

Accordingly, I made some minor code changes in Numishare to handle IIIF manifests for combined images (obverse and reverse in the same image file). You can see an example of a Philip III coin from Harvard here.

The Harvard Art Museums' coins in Pella will be the perfect test cases for applying Open Annotation + IIIF for annotating symbols and monograms defined by URIs in the Online Greek Corpus project.