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