Over 1,000 coins from the Gallo-Roman Museum of Tongeren added to OCRE

This is several months late, but in January, more than 1,000 coins from the Gallo-Roman Museum of Tongeren were added to Online Coins of the Roman Empire. A large number of these coins have findspots, which have propagated into the mapping functions through the OCRE user interfaces.

What's particularly notable of this collection joining the Nomisma.org consortium is a successful technical test of the Nomisma RDF import back-end's findspot reconciliation workflow. The technical team at the museum wrote a dynamic transformation into the Nomisma RDF model that conforms to our current CIDOC-CRM inspired findspot structure. Their gazetteer system of choice is Geonames.org, and these Geonames URIs are reconciled to Wikidata.org ones upon ingestion into the Nomisma SPARQL endpoint.

 

An example of Augustus 287 with a findspot of Tongeren, Belgium

 

Although this is not a unique example, since many Iron Age British coins from the British Museum or Portable Antiquities Scheme with findspots have been uploaded into Nomisma and made accessible through Iron Age Coins in Britain, these imported Iron Age datasets were cleaned and normalized by myself in OpenRefine and stored on our web server as static RDF files. The Gallo-Roman Museum of Tongeren is therefore the first external partner to adopt the findspot model through a dynamically generated export, which enabled the testing of Geonames->Wikidata reconciliation upon ingestion.

Many other collections that may have individual findspots associated with coins have not updated their findspot RDF model accordingly.