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.