Thursday, April 30, 2020

Updates to Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic

With the impending launch of the new database of Greek Coin Hoards (derived from the 1973 publication, Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards), which will implement an updated findspot model that results in an RDF model more in line with ARIADNE's CIDOC-CRM recommendations, I have made some updates to Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic. Both hoard projects now export compatible Linked Open Data.

Instead of linking directly to a Geonames URL for the findspot (which can result in a collision of triples when aggregating content across collections that use the same gazetteer), the findspot is essentially reconceived as having been found within the boundaries of the gazetteer place, but is not that place itself.

Similar to a proposal I submitted to integrate the ARIADNE findspot data model into Linked Art, the new model extends nmo:hasFindspot from a direct gazetteer link to a node represented an nmo:Find (event), roughly equivalent to CRM sci:S19_Encounter_Event.


<http://numismatics.org/chrr/id/BAL>
  a nmo:Hoard, skos:Concept ;
  skos:prefLabel "Balanesti (Romania; BAL)"@en ;
  nmo:hasClosingDate "-0078"^^xsd:gYear ;
  nmo:hasFindspot [
    a nmo:Find ;
    crm:P7_took_place_at [
      a crm:E53_Place ;
      rdfs:label "Balanesti, Romania"@en ;
      crm:P89_falls_within <https://sws.geonames.org/685694/>
    ]
  ] ;
  dc:tableOfContents <http://numismatics.org/chrr/id/BAL#contents> ;
  void:inDataset <http://numismatics.org/chrr/> .

<https://sws.geonames.org/685694/>
  a crm:E53_Place ;
  rdfs:label "Bălăneşti (Romania)" ;
  crm:P2_has_type <http://vocab.getty.edu/aat/300008347> ;
  geo:location <https://sws.geonames.org/685694/#this> ;
  crm:P168_place_is_defined_by <https://sws.geonames.org/685694/#this> .

<https://sws.geonames.org/685694/#this>
  a geo:SpatialThing, crmgeo:SP5_Geometric_Place_Expression ;
  crmgeo:Q9_is_expressed_in_terms_of <http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q215848> ;
  geo:lat 45.06667 ;
  geo:long 23.4 ;
  crmgeo:asWKT "POINT (23.4 45.06667)"^^http://www.opengis.net/ont/geosparql#wktLiteral .


The geographic coordinates are still linked/encoded with the W3C WGS ontology (geo:) to remain compatible with our practices elsewhere in the Nomisma data model, but also implemented crmgeo for encoding points and polygons as WKT, and designate the spatial node with both the geo:SpatialThing and crmgeo:SP5_Geometric_Place_Expression RDF classes.

In the process of developing a stylesheet to make some minor updates to the underlying NUDS Hoard XML model, I discovered numerous missing or inaccurate Geonames place references. Many of the missing places were cities in the former Yugoslavia, which did not match anything in the automated Geonames lookup we devised for this project back in late 2012/early 2013. Many of these places have mapped to modern cities in Slovenia, Croatia, other countries.


Improved coverage in the former Yugoslavia

Other corrected places may have been Romanian or Italian administrative divisions instead of the lower-level populated place. The Geonames place codes have been resolved to Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus terms, which have been reindexed into CHRR as a facet on the browse page.

Another area where a few gaps were filled came with Nomisma IDs for extraneous authorities that have only recently been created for IGCH, e.g., Juba I. With these authorities having been linked to Nomisma, the reindexing process has pulled the related dynasties and corporate entities related to these people and exposed them as new facets in the browse page.


Furthermore, since the coins of Juba I appear in more than a dozen Roman Republican coin hoards, these hoards now populate the geographic distribution in the map on his Nomisma page.

Distribution of Republican coin hoards including the coins of Juba I

Thursday, April 23, 2020

Bronze types from Ptolemy I - IV published to PCO

More than 500 bronze coin types from Catharine Lorber's Coins of the Ptolemaic Empire Vol. I, Part II (Ptolemy I - IV) have been published online to Ptolemaic Coins Online. You can access them by selecting Bronze from the material facet in the browse page: http://numismatics.org/pco/results?q=material_facet%3A%22Bronze%22.

Many thanks to Gunnar Dumke at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg for working on this spreadsheet. It was essentially publication ready, except for a few new Nomisma IDs for authorities and denominations that needed to be created.

The next task is to export a new batch of coins from the American Numismatic Society collection that will map to these new URIs through the underlying Svoronos concordances.

The coins from the British Museums (for example, http://numismatics.org/pco/id/cpe.1_2.B508), were already ingested with Svoronos URIs, and automatically show up in CPE types via skos:exactMatch links in the underlying Linked Open Data. Unfortunately, the BM coins aren't photographed.

Update: April 24, 2020


The ANS coins with Svoronos references have been exported from our curatorial database into MANTIS. Nearly six hundred bronzes have been linked to the new PCO URIs and integrated into Nomisma.org's SPARQL endpoint for query and analysis. There are now about 3,200 Ptolemaic coins linked to PCO, more than half of which have come from the ANS collection. Both the British Museum and Bibliothèque nationale de France have contributed more than 600 coins, and another nine institutions of varying sizes have contributed the remainder.