ANS web projects, IIIF deployed on new server

In other big news today with the consolidation of Nomisma and ANS digital projects on numismatics.org onto the same dedicated server (which is much more powerful than the separate cloud servers each domain previously ran on), our IIIF image server (Loris) and presentation APIs are now running in production. IIIF functionality extends beyond simple zoom functionality and manifests for single objects in our own collection (e.g., http://numismatics.org/collection/1944.100.39026), but an entirely new array of features, some of which have been described in previous posts:

• There are now 160,000 photographed objects in the ANS collection, the high res photos of which are available through IIIF. Of these, more than 55,000 are Greek and Roman coins linked to types defined in OCRE, CRRO, and PELLA. Like our other partners that publish IIIF, the zoomable images are available on the coin type landing page, but the ANS adds tremendous coverage in these domains. See dozens of our coins linked to Price 4.
• Manifests for coin types are generated dynamically by a combination of NUDS typological metadata + SPARQL query results for associated physical specimens with IIIF service metadata. The manifest is linked at the top of the page, along with a link to view the manifest. These sorts of manifests are the jumping-off point for annotating symbols and monograms on coins.
• The ANS Archives support IIIF through TEI (digitized coin hoard notebooks), EAD, and MODS resources (photographs). Photographs linked to ancient places defined in Pleiades can be ingested into Pelagios. More here: http://eaditor.blogspot.com/2017/10/eaditor-now-supports-ead-and-mods-to.html. The Newell notebooks are so far the only digital resources featuring annotations, so far.
• Rainer Simon is reindexing the ANS coins linked to ancient places via Nomisma->Pleiades concordances into Peripleo. These extend beyond the 55,000 Greco-Roman coins linked to OCRE, CRRO, and PELLA to include all ancient coins linked to Nomisma IDs for mints. See https://twitter.com/aboutgeo/status/925292397986279425. Of the 140,000 coins in MANTIS linked to Pleiades places, about 83,000 have been photographed/provide IIIF service metadata to Pelagios.https://twitter.com/aboutgeo/status/925292397986279425

Nomisma launches OpenRefine reconciliation service

I recently received a spreadsheet of Classical and Archaic Greek coin hoard data, atomized and parsed for content in the Inventory of Greek Coin Hoard textual descriptions. I loaded this spreadsheet up into Open Refine in order to break it down further in order to separate the Authority column into separate columns for mints, regions, and rulers, parse uncertain attributions (looking for question marks), separate the numeric count of coins from denomination abbreviations, etc. The Authority column itself contained mostly mints, all of which are represented by concepts defined on Nomisma.org. The easiest way to reconcile this list would be to run against an OpenRefine reconciliation API, which did not exist--so I built one between Friday and Monday.

The new service is now listed among the Nomisma APIs, available at http://nomisma.org/apis/reconcile.

The API does not support every possible optional service yet, but it supports the most useful one for normalizing data to Nomisma concepts. Here's what it does do:

• The main reconciliation service, returning the basic service JSON when there are no query parameters. Both the 'query' and 'queries' HTTP parameters are supported. These query parameters are parsed into one or more Solr queries to yield a response.
• The Preview API, for displaying a little HTML popup when hovering the mouse over a reconciled candidate (a simple serialization from the concept RDF/XML into HTML).
• The Entity Suggest API, which allows a user to type in a new term, yielded an autosuggest response (this is also Solr serialized into JSON). The suggest flyout is also supported, which is a serialization of the concept RDF/XML into a tiny JSON snippet to be displayed when hovering over the autosuggested term.

These are the most vital services, which enabled me to normalize about 3,500 of 4,000 lines of the CSV to existing Nomisma mints, regions, and rulers. About half remaining 500 are multiple mints of the same place name that need to verified on a case by case basis (by checking the IGCH or Coin Hoards record). After that, the only non-reconciled values remaining are rulers that do not have Nomisma IDs yet. We can extract a facet list of these values and generate the Nomisma IDs, and then reconcile the list.

I spent about two days working on these APIs, and then did almost 90% of the matching in five minutes.

University of Graz joins Nomisma partner consortium

The Institute of Ancient History and Classical Antiquities at the University of Graz houses a collection of nearly 4000 antique coins. Nearly 300 of these are Roman Republican coins identified with Michael Crawford's Roman Republican Coinage numbers. Working with Elisabeth Steiner, who is responsible for the digital archaeological collections, we were able to link these to URIs for RRC types defined in Coinage of the Roman Republic Online and ingest them into the Nomisma.org SPARQL endpoint. Additionally, the photos of the coins are available through IIIF services, and the coin metadata (canonically stored as TEI files in a Fedora repository) are transformed dynamically and served as Nomisma-compliant RDF directly from their information system.

There are several thousand Roman imperial coins with Roman Imperial Coinage references, but some work remains in normalizing emperor + RIC numbers to OCRE URIs.

You can see an example of two University of Graz coins linked to RRC 282/1 here.