Thursday, June 8, 2017

Updates to symbol/monogram pages in OCRE

I have just pushed some changes to symbol and monogram pages in OCRE, which are more broadly applied to Numishare. Up to this point, we have published several dozen late Roman monograms from RIC 10 and a small handful of Siscia Officina marks from RIC 8. The data underlying these symbols are in RDF, conforming to the Nomisma ontology and data model. The web pages displayed little more than a list of metadata about the symbol, but no further context. Altogether, these pages weren't particularly useful as scholarly tools.

Map of Marcian monogram 1

Following updates to Nomisma, I have implemented two new features on symbol pages:

  1. A map showing the distribution of mints and findspots (a heatmap layer showing all findspots and individual layers for finds and hoards). The geoJSON APIs in Nomisma were extended to support SPARQL queries for geographic data by passing a 'symbol' request parameter. See http://nomisma.org/apis#getMints, for example.
  2. A list of coin types that bear these symbols, with available images, when available. The list of types is downloadable as CSV, and the user can click a button to view the underlying SPARQL query, which could be copied, modified, and submitted directly to Nomisma's endpoint (see below).

Coin types that show Marcian monogram 1

Below is the SPARQL query for getting a list of types associated with a monogram, with some basic metadata:

SELECT ?type ?label ?startDate ?endDate ?mint ?mintLabel ?den ?denLabel WHERE {
  {
    SELECT ?side WHERE {
     ?side nmo:hasMonogram <%URI%>
    }
  }
?type ?prop ?side
   MINUS {?type dcterms:isReplacedBy ?replaced}
   ?type a nmo:TypeSeriesItem ;
   skos:prefLabel ?label FILTER(langMatches(lang(?label), "en")) .
   OPTIONAL {?type nmo:hasStartDate ?startDate}
   OPTIONAL {?type nmo:hasEndDate ?endDate}
   OPTIONAL {?type nmo:hasMint ?mint . 
    ?mint skos:prefLabel ?mintLabel 
       FILTER(langMatches(lang(?mintLabel), "en"))}
   OPTIONAL {?type nmo:hasDenomination ?den . 
    ?den skos:prefLabel ?denLabel 
       FILTER(langMatches(lang(?denLabel), "en"))}
}

Since these features are now inherent to Numishare, they will be available for the enormous array of Greek monograms that will be published as part of the Hellenistic Royal Coinages project. I hope to have a prototype of a few monograms published in PELLA within the next few weeks.

As more and more Nomisma partners adopt IIIF, these monogram URIs will form a basis for image annotation, and eventually these symbol pages will use Open Annotation and IIIF APIs to display photographic examples of monograms, in addition to a print and web-ready idealized SVG renderings.

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