Symbols and monograms on Nomisma.org

Several years ago, the Nomisma scientific committee made a decision to create a new namespace in which we would publish URIs for symbols that appear on coins (including monograms): http://nomisma.org/symbol/.

Only recently have symbols been added into this namespace, primarily religious symbols that appear on Medieval coinage. At present, these symbols link to SVG graphics hosted by the Wikimedia foundation. By the end of the year, there will likely be thousands of Greek monograms added into Nomisma, disambiguated from identical glyphs between across the Hellenistic Royal Coinages (HRC) and Corpus Nummorum typologies. This is especially important since the same monograms in PELLA, Seleucid Coins Online, and Ptolemaic Coins Online are not interlinked, even when not factoring in the integration of a project external to the HRC umbrella.

The Nomisma.org browse page now includes a new filter for Concept Scheme, enabling users to sort between only those in the /id/ namespace and the /symbol/ namespace. If the /symbol/ namespace is selected in the query, additional query options become available.

Adjacent to the pagination buttons are buttons that enable changing the view from the typical list layout to a grid, which is better for perusing the symbol graphics. Additionally, it is possible to filter monograms by constituent letters, much like in the symbol interfaces in Hellenistic Royal Coinages. A user can select one or more letters, whether Latin, Greek, or another script, to filter the monograms to those containing those letters. The perceived letters are, of course, somewhat subjective based on the specialist who undertook the work of manually itemizing them.

At present, only 2 of the 13 symbols published in Nomisma are monograms (chi-rho and tau-rho Christograms), so there is a very limited range of available letters for filtering. That will change once Greek monograms are added into the Nomisma namespace.

 

Extensions for displaying symbols in Nomisma.org browse page

Once these symbols are connected to typologies integrated as Linked Open Data into the Nomisma SPARQL endpoint, I will be able to generate lists of relevant types and maps depicting the mints, findspots, and hoards associated with them, which will create a more complete picture of their distribution over time and space, a more significant advancement in data visualization as compared to the relative silos of the HRC sub-projects.