Recapping ECFN / Nomisma in Sofia and Hackathon Athens

I am finally back in the office as of yesterday following two weeks in Europe for two related conferences: the 10th joint meeting of Nomisma.org and the European Coin Find Network and Hackathon Athens, hosted by Thomas Faucher at the French School of Athens. The former meeting is increasingly a formal conference while the latter included presentations of the current state of several projects which jumped off two days of workshops and roundtable discussions. After the conclusion of the Hackathon, I helped install Numishare on a cloud server for CEAlex to publish coins from archaeological excavations in Alexandria, Egypt.

My presentation at the ECFN/Nomisma conference, "FAIR Findspots: Making Data Reusable," is about the current Nomisma.org data model for representing findspots and linking findspots to existing gazetteer URIs, such as Geonames or Wikidata. I discussed interoperability through using HTTP protocols (content negotiation) which enable external database systems to reuse hoard/findspot data for cataloging. An example that I made is the Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire project. This is one of the largest-scale numismatic datasets in existence, although hoard URIs cannot be reused for cataloging in the sense that machine-readable data cannot be extracted from CHRE in order to power geographic visualizations (in contrast to coinhoards.org). Making CHRE more reusable and interoperable would radically transform the research value of other, related projects, such as Online Coins of the Roman Empire. I am hoping with further technical guidance, the IT staff at Oxford can implement standardized data exports from the CHRE database to enhance external projects.

A PDF of my presentation is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8120871, and the presentation can be viewed at the 6 hour 39 minute mark of the livestream on YouTube.

In Athens, I presented a general introduction to Nomisma.org and conducted a live demo of using OpenRefine to normalize some Roman imperial coinage data from the Getty museum, demonstrating the Nomisma.org and OCRE reconciliation APIs. The intention wasn't to teach participants the ins and outs of using OpenRefine (which can't be done in 45 minutes), but to illustrate the sorts of tasks that can be semi-automated in preparing data for integration into Nomisma.org.

The demo presupposes that the coins are already online. We did discuss how to start from scratch. There's no easy answer to this; data still need to be inputted in spreadsheets or exported from excavation databases (for example, Microsoft Access or FileMaker) into CSV, normalized, and then imported into Numishare or the Dedalo platform. The coin finds of Sardinia are published in Dedalo, while Federico Carbone of the University of Salerno showed the Coin Finds Hub of Italy, which is presented in Numishare. In either case, IT staff are often necessary to deploy these databases on web servers and/or handle the transformation and upload of data. There's no magic bullet in publishing excavation coins online without some level of technical support. We did discuss implementing a simple spreadsheet mapping tool into NUDS that could be uploaded in Numishare.

I expect both the Coin Finds Hub of Italy (which includes the excavations of Paestum, Pompeii, and others) and the Alexandrian coins to be available online later in the fall and integrated (at least to a small degree) to type portals such as IRIS, OCRE, or PCO.