At long last, our spreadsheet of people associated with Roman Imperial Coinage (emperors, empresses and other family members, etc.) has gone live in Nomisma.org. The Roman emperors, which are among the first IDs ever created in Nomisma in 2012 or before for the Online Coins of the Roman Empire project, have now been brought up to the standard model we later implemented for Greek, Roman Republican, and other persons. This entails:
- Creating about a dozen dynasty URIs in Nomisma and linking persons to them, when applicable (see http://nomisma.org/id/severan_dynasty).
- Creating a small handful of foaf:Organization URIs that represent some breakaway kingdoms, such as the Gallic Empire.
- Adding proper start and end dates for the roles individuals played with respect to their reigns.
- Added birth and death dates, when known.
After establishing links between people and dynasties and corporate entities, the associated dynasty/organization Nomisma page is augmented with additional research context, such as lists of typologies and maps showing the distribution of mints, hoards, and findspots.
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| Nomisma page for the Gallic Empire |
This additional structure will also enhance OCRE, enabling us to index dynasties and organizations for faceted search.
Not only that, but as the American Numismatic Society nears completion of the migration of the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine departments into a new curatorial database system on the CollectiveAccess platform, we will be able to incorporate these new entities into the CollectiveAccess database, and therefore will improve the quality and consistency of data presented in Mantis, our public database of coins.
The Medals and Islamic departments have already been migrated to CollectiveAccess with significantly improved quality by linking to Nomisma.org, Wikidata, and Geonames to standardize personal, organizational, and geographic names. I will write more on that subject later.
