The ANS and Oxford University launches Bactrian Indo-Greek Rulers (BIGR)

Although it has been announced informally on Twitter, our official press release was issued during the INC conference in mid-September to coincide with a paper presented by Simon Glenn and Gunnar Dumke in the digital futures of Hellenistic coinages session. This typology includes 531 types and many additional subtypes, linked to more than 4,000 total specimens from three major collections. The photographic coverage of the parent types is nearly complete, and these typologies have already been integrated into the Hellenistic Royal Coinages umbrella site, backing Bactrian and Indo-Greek coinages available through the same interfaces as Seleucid, Ptolemaic, etc.

Nomisma Updates: New partner and interlinked data

Through the KENOM project, the Coin Cabinet of the Mainz City Archives joins the Nomisma.org consortium, providing more than 60 coins to Online Coins of the Roman Empire.

In addition, more than 3,500 URIs from the IKMK thesaurus system (the Normdatenportal, or NDP) have been incorporated into Nomisma RDF, as either skos:closeMatch for mints or skos:exactMatch for other classes. The data were provided by Karsten Dahmen at the MK Berlin, and the URIs were incorporated into the Nomisma RDF with a relatively simple script.

Geographic export in Nomisma.org finally migrated from Pelagios RDF to Linked Places GeoJSON-LD

At long last, the Nomisma.org geographic export from in the nearly ten year old Pelagios RDF/XML model has been migrated into Linked Places GeoJSON-LD. The query of places from Nomisma includes all mints and regions that have a spatial extent. These places are predominately mints, as only a few regions have explicit polygon spatial boundaries. As such, the Linked Places export does not include the full geographic hierarchy between mints and regions (yet), although it may be possible to generate a bounding box of a region formed by the extent of child mint locations. The new download URL is http://nomisma.org/linked-places.json.

Another requirement of a Linked Places place is a "when" property that includes a data range and optional period URIs. These are not explicit within Nomisma, although they can be derived by the link between the mint/region and a "field of numismatics" concept URI. There are about two dozen fields of numismatics in Nomisma (e.g., Roman, Byzantine, Islamic, and Greek), and I have updated these concepts to insert URIs for corresponding periods in the DAI's ChronOntology, Perio.do, and style facets defined in the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus. Fields of numismatics aren't precisely periods, and so they are linked with the skos:related property rather than skos:exactMatch, which is usually implemented for linking to external thesauri from Nomisma concepts.

The date range of the "when" property is required in Linked Places. It is not currently available in the JSON export, but we are going to put a broad start and end date range into the field of numismatics concepts, which we can then incorporate into the export after minor modifications to the underlying SPARQL query. Apart from this the period "name" is not populated, since we are only storing URIs for these concepts in Nomisma, and not any additional metadata we might extract from those target information systems.

Other than these temporary deficiencies, the model is fairly fleshed out. There are about 2,000 places with geographic coordinates in Nomisma.

Linked Places Geo-JSON-LD views in the GeoJSON sandbox.

 

Hopefully this export will pave the way for Nomisma.org geographic concepts to be integrated into the World Historical Gazetteer since the old Pelagios geographic aggregation system has been deprecated.

Esty's die calculations and frequency visualizations added to CRRO

At long last, I've had a gap between a couple of projects to spend some time developing a new feature in Coinage of the Roman Republic Online (CRRO) that Liv Yarrow and Lucia Carbone requested last winter. There is now a significant number of coins die-linked within the Roman Republican Die Project (RRDP) that this network of relationships can be used to dynamically calculate the estimated number of dies for a Roman Republican coin type in CRRO. These calculations are based on formulas in Warren G. Esty's 2006 "How to estimate the original number of dies and the coverage of a sample" and the 2011 follow-up, "The Geometric Model for Estimating the Number of Dies," with p = 1 instead of p = 2 in a later addendum.

A new API in Nomisma was created to perform these underlying calculations and respond with JSON data that are rendered into HTML with a d3.js chart in corresponding pages in CRRO. The http://nomisma.org/apis/dieCounts API executes a SPARQL query to generate a list of named graphs that correspond to die studies (in this case, Richard Schaefer's RRDP, http://nomisma.org/editor/rschaefer) and related type corpora. There is also a list of available formulas for calculating die estimates, although the only one at present is Esty's. The formulas are extensible.

The next phase of the API call once selecting a formula (http://nomisma.org/apis/dieCounts/esty) is to provide two request parameters: 'type' for the coin type URI and 'dieStudy' for the named graph URI. For example, http://nomisma.org/apis/dieCounts/esty?dieStudy=http%3A%2F%2Fnomisma.org%2Feditor%2Frschaefer&type=http%3A%2F%2Fnumismatics.org%2Fcrro%2Fid%2Frrc-336.1c

This JSON response includes the number of specimens (n), number of unique dies (d), singletons (dies that appear on only one coin, d1), estimated coverage (based on these numbers, c_est), estimated number of dies for the type (d_est, given the coverage value), and the minimum and maximum range of dies given 95% confidence.

The response includes these calculations for both the obverse and the reverse, if applicable (some types may be linked to only obverse or reverse dies, but not both). Four SPARQL queries are submitted for each side of the coin and the JSON response that results from these queries is used by CRRO to display the results in HTML and a line graph.

The SPARQL queries for the obverse dies associated with RRC 336/1c are as follows:

• Number of coins with a die: https://gist.github.com/ewg118/de29e459bde316f854b41d390081853b
• Unique number of dies associated with a type: https://gist.github.com/ewg118/9a587212964436098a47c85b8fa58faf
• Number of singletons. This is a subselect of dies connected to one object: https://gist.github.com/ewg118/d7d1d655b8e740784bed6c3886cb566d
• Frequency (how many dies are represented by how many coins): https://gist.github.com/ewg118/53ece887943761f680184ecbc02b2d12
  

The first three queries are executed before implementing Esty's die estimate calculations, which are reflected in his 2006 article (with some later revision, as noted above):

The template for applying Esty's calculations is in XSLT with some additional math functions that aren't inherent in the XSLT 2.0 spec. These templates are extensible to include proposed formulas from other scholars.

The end result for RRC 336/1c appears below:

Die estimates and frequency visualization

The frequency statistics are also downloadable as CSV.

These calculations are performed dynamically when the page is loaded, so they reflect the current state of data entry. The numbers can and probably will change over time as more data are added into the Roman Republican knowledge graph stored in Nomisma.org. In the past, it may have taken weeks or months to aggregate the data necessary to perform these calculations, which can now be generated nearly instantaneously based on tens of thousands of coins linked to both types and dies.

Updating search context in RRDP: coin types as a search facet

I have finally had the time to enhance the search indexing of dies in the Roman Republican Die Project. Although RRDP dies may have the RRC number in the ID portion of the URI or in the title of the record, there is no explicit link in RRDP metadata from a die to a type. Instead, dies are linked to specimens, and specimens are linked to types. The initial version of RRDP only indexed explicit metadata into Apache Solr for the search and browse page--in this case, control marks represented by symbols, letters, or monograms. The die -> specimen -> type graph can only be extracted via Nomisma.org's SPARQL endpoint, and I have just recently implemented this SPARQL lookup into the Solr indexing process by creating an API in Numishare to extract a list of coin types associated with a die URI.

 

Updated RRDP browse page with coin type facet

As a result, the coin type(s) are now visible in the browse page and can be used for narrowing down the query response. In addition, the list of associated types is visible in the RRDP record page, below the typological description and above the die example photographs.

Updated layout for subtypes in Numishare

Upon request for Coinage of the Roman Republic Online, the layout of subtypes for a parent type has been modified to present the subtypes in a table format with example images presented much like the browse page or types associated with Nomisma concepts (e.g., Seleucus VI). The table includes columns for obverse and reverse (where most differences between subtypes are apparent). This format makes it much clearer which elements of the typology vary, for example differences in legend or symbols on the obverse and/or reverse of the coin.

RRC 363/1 and subtypes.

The "Examples of this Type" section has been moved down under the subtype list. The example list still contains all specimens linked to the parent type or any level of subtype below this, and can be paged through by clicking the relevant buttons in the interface. If you want to see only specimens associated with a subtype, click on the link in the subtype label to view the Numishare record page for that subtype, and all example specimens associated with the subtype will be available for view or download.

Seleucid Coins 1.1 and subtypes, with variations in symbols

The Egypt Centre at Swansea University joins OCRE

The Egypt Centre of Swansea University is the latest partner in the Nomisma.org consortium. The museum houses 6,000 objects from Egypt and the ancient world, including Greece, Rome, Cyprus, Mesopotamia, and Nubia. Among these are about 50 Roman imperial coins, which have now been integrated into Online Coins of the Roman Empire.

RIC II Nerva 30 (denarius)

Although the collection is small, it does provide the sole photographic example of at least one type, Nerva 30 (denarius).

New version of Nomisma.org site released

Last Friday was the soft launch of the new Nomisma.org website. The design aspects of dynamically generated pages are largely unchanged (search results based on Solr, interfaces built on SPARQL, concept pages generated from RDF), but we have migrated all static content to Jekyll. This will make it easier for Nomisma committee members to update pages through Github, making the project more sustainable in the long-term since I (Ethan Gruber) won't have to update these static pages within the Nomisma framework.

 

The new site introduces an improved structure for getting information about Nomisma. It includes:

• An about page with the history of the project and list of current projects.
• The scientific committee.
• A list of Nomisma working groups and whom to email about contributing.
• A landing page with more concise information about how to get Nomisma data.
• Improved UI for SPARQL examples (expect more examples to come) and two YouTube videos that introduce Nomisma's data model and SPARQL endpoint.
• A link to a Digital Numismatics bibliography (a Zotero group) maintained by the scientific committee
• Furthermore, I made an improvement to the partner datasets page in order to categorize contributions by dataset type (collections, types, hoards, etc.).

 In the near future, you should expect the publication of the Nomisma cookbook. This cookbook is our long-overdue detailed documentation of our ontology and data model, with specific modelling examples represented as TTL.

New version of Coinage of the Roman Republic Online released

Today, an improved version of Coinage of the Roman Republic Online (CRRO) was released. This release improves the consistency of the data entry and implements the type-subtype hierarchical structure in Crawford's original RRC typology. The CRRO types are no longer a flat structure of about 2200 entries, but there are now about 1750 parent types and about 500 subtypes, with subtypes links to parents through the skos:broader RDF property upon ingestion into Nomisma.org. Improvements were made in other areas as well:

• Issuers represented by symbols or letters were generated as Nomisma.org URIs. Some symbols were reused in different periods, implying different moneyers, and so each one has a different URI, e.g., http://nomisma.org/id/star_1_issuer_rrc.
• Type descriptions and legends were cleaned and normalized. Control marks of various types were split into different positions with respect to the obverse and reverse of the coin. These symbols are now queryable in the browse page, much like Hellenistic Royal Coinages.
• Deities URIs from the British Museum were replaced with new Nomisma.org ones. Several new deities were created in Nomisma that were not accessible in the search facets before, although we certainly have not isolated all of them yet.
  
• People who appear on the coins are now searchable through a portrait facet. These types mostly affect coins of the First and Second Triumvirates, although some miscellaneous regnal or early Republican period people were created in Nomisma.org.
• The mint facet was cleaned up so that only true Nomisma.org mints appear in the list (or "Uncertain Value") and historical regions moved into the hierarchical region facet. We rely on Nomisma's geographic hierarchy to populate the region facet when we are able to identify the mint.
• All of the Roman Republican issuers have been linked to the Nomisma concept for the Roman Republic, with start and end dates for their role(s) as a moneyer.
  
• We adopted the EpiDoc TEI specification for ligatures in the legends (see this query result and related types).

 

Example of browse page with ligatures in legends and queryable symbols.

 

Background

When CRRO was published in 2015, it had been derived from cataloging data from the British Museum database, curated by Eleanor Ghey. Specimens that were not represented in the BM were supplemented by data entered by Rick Witschonke. At the time, Rick was entering the late stages in his fight against cancer, and very much wanted to see an "OCRE" for Roman Republican Coinage. We expedited the publication of CRRO as a result, even though it was not quite as robust at the outset as OCRE was. Despite the popularity of CRRO (second only to OCRE in usage out of the ANS' digital projects), we have not been able to revisit the data structure of the project in over 7 years. Furthermore, the original Excel spreadsheet from which the CRRO data originated no longer seems to exist or be accessible online.

Several months ago, I processed the NUDS/XML files from CRRO back into a spreadsheet that I began to normalize in OpenRefine. After some clean-up, this was uploaded as a Google Spreadsheet for more fine-tuned editing by the ANS curatorial associate, Alice Sharpless (who primarily works on the Roman Republican Die Project). Alice did a significant amount of normalizing legends and type descriptions, fixed issues with the conflation of region URIs as mints, and split symbols into multiple columns.

Next Steps

Now that CRRO exists as a canonical spreadsheet that can easily be edited or updated, we plan to insert some new Republican typologies that have been published since RRC in 1974. These new types can be slotted into the spreadsheet as necessary with an appropriate bibliographic reference. These new types are necessary for further cataloging both in RRDP and Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic, which will hopefully see a new edition from Kris Lockyear.

Nomisma and ANS digital projects accessible at HTTPS

Following the migration of the American Numismatic Society website and digital projects (including Nomisma.org) from our old Rackspace server to a new cloud server hosted by Amazon Web Services, the ANS website (Wordpress) has been fully migrated to use an SSL certificate and HTTPS. The same certificate has been applied to the other ANS digital projects to enable secure interactions via HTTPS URLs, but the old HTTP URLs do not forward automatically to HTTPS. The main reason for this is that http:// and https:// URIs are considered difference in Semantic Web applications, and migrating to HTTPS creates a number of unpredictable downstream effects for consumers of our machine readable data.

Those who use SSL in their own information systems and want to consume Nomisma or ANS machine readable data using Javascript in a web browser will be able to do so by replacing http with https in the web service URL.

The ANS IIIF image server has incorporated automatic forwarding to HTTPS, and so the advantage in this case is that other systems that use HTTPS (such as the Digital Library of the Middle East, Peripleo, Iron Age Coins in Britain, and other external aggregators) will be able to securely load JSON resources from IIIF manifests and the image server.

Updates to mapping functionality in Numishare

At long last, I have implemented some contextual changes in the display of points in the maps pages in the Numishare platform, particularly with respect to the sizing of points to reflect density of distribution (like what had already been implemented in maps on nomisma.org and record pages in Numishare).

The changes can be summarized as follows:

• Mint, findspot, and geographic subject (applies to Art of Devastation only, so far) layers have variable sizing based on density.
• The marker cluster plugin has been disabled for individual findspots, so each point is readily apparent without further zooming into the map.
• The findspot layer now refreshes correctly after narrowing the search facets down.
• Symbol facet menus now display the correct, human-readable label, and monogram SVG graphics will appear in the menu, as it functions on the browse page.

These visualization updates have also been implemented in the map popup window on the browse page.

The changes are most readily apparent in the Celtic Coins Index Digital. 

Findspot distribution of the Corieltavi.

 And Hellenistic Royal Coinages clearly illustrates the highest level of production in Amphipolis and Alexandria:

And while the general map of the Roman Empire isn't particularly illustrative (about half of all types minted in Rome), when you drill down into specific queries, the variations in production are more apparent.

Mint distribution of Constantine I

About 600 RIC X photographed gold coins from the British Museum added to OCRE

Before the holiday, I received a spreadsheet export from Richard Abdy, one of the curators in the Coins & Medals department at the British Museum, which includes all of the photographed gold coins from RIC volume X. This represents an addition of approximately 600 objects to Online Coins of the Roman Empire. Quite a few of these contributions represent the only photographed example of the type.

Gold coins from RIC 10 in OCRE.

Swiss National Museum joins Nomisma

Under the direction of long-time Nomisma scientific committee member Christian Weiss, the Swiss National Museum has joined the Nomisma Linked Open Data cloud, providing data for nearly 8,500 coins in the collection to various online type portals, including Hellenistic, Roman Republican, Imperial, and British Iron Age coinage.

The most significant contribution comes in the form of 8,000 Swiss coins from the Medieval to Modern periods in the prototype Online Swiss Coin Archive (OSCAR) project, which catalogs more than 9,000 typologies produced in Switzerland from 491 CE to the present day. Already, several hundred coins from Berlin and Winterthur were accessible through OSCAR in previous data imports. While OSCAR is not yet complete (there is much work remaining in creating Nomisma URIs for Swiss authorities and denominations), the preliminary RDF data for OSCAR have been uploaded into the Nomisma SPARQL endpoint, facilitating more advanced visualization and context in associated Nomisma URIs (see Zurich, for example). With the Swiss National Collection online, more than 40% of the Swiss types in OSCAR are illustrated by at least one photographed specimen.

OSCAR 257, a 1533 schilling from Zurich

More than 8,000 Roman Imperial Coins from the BnF added to OCRE

More than 8,000 Roman Imperial coins from the Bibliothèque nationale de France have been integrated into Online Coins of the Roman Empire. This is a significant addition to the project, but does not represent the fully body of the BnF's material. The import includes the issues from Augustus to Trajan, a portion of the Hadrianic collection, and later coins from Carus to Diocletian.

This represents the BnF's first contribution to OCRE after providing large amounts of Roman Republican and Hellenistic coinage and a modest number of British Iron Age coinage to Iron Age Coins in Britain. Presently, the Bibliothèque nationale has made nearly 40,000 coins available in the numismatic Linked Open Data cloud.

A BnF coin (IMP-139) with IIIF images of type Hadrian II.3 510