FileMaker Pro finally retired at the ANS

After about two decades, the American Numismatic Society has finally turned the lights off in its FileMaker Pro database. The last two departments, Medieval and Modern European were migrated into CollectiveAccess about one month ago, although not in an entirely completed form--the places, people, organizations, dynasties, and denominations still require further normalization by curator, David Yoon, over the next year before these entities are merged into the relational database system. Nevertheless, FileMaker Pro cataloging has ceased, marking a major step in a once-in-a-generation task of normalizing and migrating systems.

The ANS database system was a bespoke DOS-based system pioneered in the 1980s called PRIME. The ANS was among the first major numismatic collections to implement a database for cataloging, although it was never designed as a relational database (a technology which did exist at the time). The database was ostensibly a flat "spreadsheet" data entry system with more than 100 fields, most of which were uncontrolled free-text fields. Before the World Wide Web, curators never envisioned their catalog would become public, and quality and completeness were inconsistent across departments as curators developed their own idiosyncratic data entry processes.

At some point during the 2000s, this PRIME system was picked up and moved into FileMaker Pro, with little to no intermediary normalization. Indeed, many MSDOS special characters (non-ASCII and non-UTF-8) for tabs or other such breaks were retained within FileMaker. Since its inception in 2011, many thousands of lines of PHP code were necessary to transform the ANS' cataloging data into something generally usable on the web with Mantis. The code became more and more complex as we sought to reconcile type or hoard reference patterns to URIs in OCRE, Hellenistic Royal Coinages, or Coinhoards.org. The FileMaker->Mantis publication process was a house of cards.

In 2015, we decided that migrating from FileMaker Pro was a necessity and decided upon the open source collection management software, CollectiveAccess. CollectiveAccess was built on PHP and MySQL, with a fully customizable metadata entry system that could accommodate the significant complexity our curators require. Over several years, we customized and tested a numismatic data entry system for CollectiveAccess, but it wasn't until January 2023 that we officially began the data cleanup and migration process. Significant time and effort was invested over two years in reconciling entities to URIs in Linked Open Data controlled vocabulary systems--not only Nomisma.org, but also Wikidata and Geonames. Most ancient places in CollectiveAccess align to Nomisma and most modern ones align to Geonames. I am not certain of the exact percentage, but there is significant overlap between the rulers, kingdoms, artists, dynasties, issuers, etc. in our numismatic collection and Wikidata. This reconciliation will enable better quality and more complete query of our collection.

I myself worked on Medals and Decorations, as well as Greek, Roman, and Byzantine. Sami Norling, now of the Smithsonian Institution, helped tremendously with North and Latin American, Islamic, and South Asian. David Yoon completed East Asian several months ago and continues to iron out loose ends in Medieval and Modern.

Once these data have been migrated into a proper relational database system, the difficult and time-consuming work of normalization and reconciliation has already been completed. Going from PRIME to FileMaker Pro was kicking the can down the road and building a sustainable curatorial database. If we migrate from CollectiveAccess to another system in another 10 or 20 years, it will be much easier to migrate rigorously curated relational data than the free text fields that made up the ANS database for the last 40 years. This is a significant milestone in the ANS's technological history.

At long last: rewriting the Numishare search interfaces

Most users of Numishare, whether Mantis, OCRE, or another research portal, likely head directly to the browse page in order to drill down with faceted search terms. The search page, however, includes more granular textual entry, enabling query by keywords in the type description, dates, weights (for object collections), or fragments of the legend.

This advanced search interface has remained largely unchanged since I began development work on Numishare at the University of Virginia Library in 2007. In fact, some of the JQuery Javascript code was written by Matt Mitchell and I for some other digital humanities project in the Scholars' Lab, perhaps Johanna Drucker's Artists Books Online. This code was copied and pasted almost verbatim into Numishare for repeatable text search fields or drop down menus populated by Solr search facets. It is frankly amazing for this code to function without any real fault for 18 years.

Rewriting this interface and improving its usability has been on my agenda for many years, and I have finally gotten around to it as step 1 of a larger overhaul of Numishare's public UI which will ultimately represent "Mantis 3.0." These modifications will apply to any project that uses Numishare and will include greater integration of Wikidata API services to enhance the research context and query functionality within Numishare. Since many people and organizations (artists, makers, issuers, etc.) in Mantis have been linked to Wikidata entity URIs as part of our larger database migration project, this opens the door to exploiting the Linked Open Data underlying Wikidata to facilitate queries such as "show me all medals produced by artists living in Paris in 1880-1900", even if that information is not explicit within our own curatorial database. These features will come later in 2025-6 because the first step is making functional improvements with the data we have before moving on to restructuring our data indexing workflow to make it possible to conduct these sorts of queries.

The first iteration of the advanced search form lays out all available fields arranged in clearly-defined sections as faceted lists or text fields. Text fields for people and places will also query alternative labels, making it easier to find individuals by less common names we might harvest from Wikidata or Nomisma.

Advanced search form for Mantis

 

You may have already noticed that the Mantis home page has deprecated individual department search interfaces in favor of a single interface that enables selection of department(s) in a facet list. There is now just a simple keyword search input on the home page.

Following the implementation of the new advanced search form in Numishare, I moved on to tackle another long-held goal: to improve the map-based search interface. I have now implemented the advanced search form in the map search by enabling users to click on the "Filter" button embedded on the Leaflet map. This popup uses all faceted search fields for places and entities (rather than text fields), but now also implements new fields that could not be queried in the previous map interface: legends, type descriptions, etc. Now an OCRE user can query "ORIENS" in the reverse legend to generate a map of all mints which produced coins bearing the legend. Wildcards can be used in these searches.

A query of "EXERC*" in the reverse legend of the Roman department.

 

Furthermore, it is now possible to copy a permanent URL that depicts the map so that it can be distributed online or cited in a publication.

If you are a regular user of Numishare-based projects, you may need to hard refresh the page or clear your browser cache for the new Javascript functions to load.

One of the largest tranches of Greek data added to the Nomisma LOD cloud

Over the last few months, one of the largest contributions to the Greek numismatic data cloud has been added into the Nomisma.org ecosystem:

Over 600 hoards from the Oxford CHANGE project, prepared by Leah Lazar, were published to Coinhoards.org. These are hoards predominately from Asia Minor encompassing An Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards (IGCH), Coin Hoards (CH) volumes 1-10, as well as some yet-unpublished materials. These CHANGE hoards are issued at new, canonical URIs, and the references indicate whether the contents are derived from IGCH and one or more previous Coin Hoards volumes. The contents of these hoards are relatively general--much like those of IGCH--with numbers or ranges of numbers of coins for broad typologies, e.g., "ca. 100 tetradrachms of Alexander the Great of Cyme." Nevertheless these contents improve the geographic distribution of the Nomisma concepts.

CHANGE 434 hoard with distribution map, contents, and CH references.

 

The IGCH hoards already published in Coinhoards.org which fall within the Asia Minor sphere of CHANGE (about 200) have had contents updated to include more granular lists of coin type URIs in Hellenistic Royal Coinages (HRC), Corpus Nummorum, or IRIS. This means the hoard listings have more complete typological metadata to query within Coinhoards.org itself, but now the hoards will propagate into the maps for types published by IRIS and HRC, as well as any Nomisma.org entities related to those types. Finn Conway prepared these references, which were integrated into Coinhoards.org earlier in the spring.

Furthermore, just several days ago, 11,000 coins were ingested into Nomisma's SPARQL endpoint from the CHANGE Site Finds database. These finds link to 82 different findspot locations, initially represented by Pleiades or Geonames URIs which were reconciled to Wikidata URIs upon upload into Nomisma and linked into Wikidata's geographic hierarchy. See the image below for a distribution map of a type minted in Sardis found in various excavations elsewhere in Turkey.

 

Sardis Hochard 2020 4.9.1837-57 with map of finds

 

The types from IRIS were also re-imported into Nomisma's SPARQL endpoint, as well as any physical specimens from Paris, Berlin, and the British Museum which were contributing to that project. IRIS now points directly to the Nomisma SPARQL endpoint, rather than its own internal one, which will now display all of the hoards and individual finds associated with IRIS types. In the image below, one can see the excavation coin distribution and coin hoards containing coins minted in Pergamum, including hoards from IGCH, CHANGE, and Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic.

A distribution map of the coins of Pergamum.

Altogether, this represents a significant enhancement to the research potential for Greek numismatics. A next step will be to improve the cataloging of the CHANGE hoards to point to coin type URIs.

East Asian department updated in Mantis

Last week, the East Asian department of the American Numismatic Society (over 51,000 objects) was migrated into the new CollectiveAccess curatorial database. This data cleanup and reconciliation work was performed by curator, David Yoon. Many thousands of new people, dynasties, and corporate entities were added to the database, many or most of which were linked to Wikidata URIs. Similarly, the vast majority of placenames were linked to Geonames or Wikidata, dramatically improving the quality and consistency of entity names throughout the department.

A handful of these objects have findspots, such as 1989.114.88, an 11th century Chinese coin found at al Qatif, on the Persian Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia. 

Display of 1989.114.88, a Song dynasty coin found in Saudi Arabia

 

 

Only the Medieval and Modern European departments remain for migration. This work is being undertaken now, and should be migrated into CollectiveAccess sometime by mid-May, although the reconciliation of places and entities will continue through 2026.

New Portal on Coins of the Ostrogoths

Note: this is reposted from https://ikmk.smb.museum/news?lang=de&news_id=119&news_lang=en

 The Münzkabinett Berlin and its partner institutions in Germany, Europe and the United States are pleased to announce the launch of a new digital type catalogue for the coinage of Ostrogoths in Italy in the 6th century.

The establishment of this online catalogue was funded by the Federal Program of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and comes with the kind permission of Spink Books in London and the authors of the printed corpus [Michael Andreas Metlich, The Coinage of Ostrogothic Italy and a stamp study by Theodahad Folles by M. A. Metlich and E. A. Arslan (London 2004)].

The digital type catalogue allows for the first time a freely available presentation of the coins of the migration period kingdom of the Ostrogoths in Italy, which are scattered across German and international museums. In addition to ikmk.net's partner institutions in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, there is the American Numismatic Society (which also operates and maintains the servers) and the collection of the British Museum in London. Other collections can assign their holdings using the type links provided here and import them via an API interface.

Of particular importance is the new ability of now authorizing smaller and regional collections (in particular cooperation partners of the Coin Cabinet of the State Museums and members of the IKMK family) to be able to present their own holdings to an international audience here.

The website allows for the use of various search filters, map and object views.

The homepage is written in German and English, the individual type descriptions are in English using standardized concepts from nomisma.org with individual languages represented.

Links

• Online Coinage of Ostrogothic Italy
• OCOI Typ 7 a
• Föderales Programm der SPK
• Federal Program of the Foundation Prussian Heritage (SPK)
• ikmk.net
• American Numismatic Society
• Spink Books
• NomismaHypotheses
• Pressemitteilung SPK

 

 

Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire joins the Linked Open Data cloud

In a significant enhancement to the study of Roman imperial coinage, nearly 5,000 coin hoards from the Oxford Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire project have been integrated into the numismatic Linked Open Data and are accessible in Online Coins of the Roman Empire. Nearly 5,000 coin hoards have been uploaded into Nomisma's SPARQL endpoint linking to about 14,000 Roman imperial coin types. This represents nearly one-third of all hoards in the database; the only hoards integrated into the LOD cloud are those with at least one OCRE URI, although it would be possible to upload all hoards in the future, with references to Nomisma URIs for authorities, denominations, etc.

Many CHRE hoards include geographic coordinates linking to the known findspot place name, although these places had not been coreferenced to URIs in a gazetteer system, such as Geonames. Prior to tranforming the CHRE export into RDF, I used OpenRefine to interact with Geonames APIs to link to the lowest-level geographic entity referenced by the CHRE record, whether it is a city, region, or country. A handful of places do not have Geonames URIs, but link to Wikidata.org instead. Upon uploading the RDF data into Nomisma.org, the Geonames URIs were linked to Wikidata, and the geographic hierarchy for findspots was also extracted from Wikidata and uploaded to Nomisma. It is therefore possible to query all hoards found within Greece by querying based on the Wikidata or Geonames URI for Greece, regardless of the source dataset. This enables more complex queries across datasets, such as denarius hoards of the late Roman Republic and early Principate, combining the hoards of Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic and Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire. 

In addition to significantly enhancing the geographic distribution maps depicted on the coin type pages in OCRE, the distribution maps of related Roman imperial numismatic concepts on Nomisma will also show a large number of hoards. It should also be noted that single finds of gold coins are recorded in the database, and so the geographic distribution of aurei and solidi are greatly improved.

The distribution of the coinage of Hadrian, from Hadrian's Wall to India

The distribution of Augustus 206, an aureus

Once ingested, the Nomisma-backend will extract the geographic hierarchy from Wikidata, making it possible to query for all hoards found within Romania, for example:

 

SELECT * WHERE {
  ?hoard a nmo:Hoard ;
           nmo:hasFindspot/crm:P7_took_place_at/crm:P89_falls_within ?findspot .
  ?findspot crm:P89_falls_within+ <http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q218> ;
            rdfs:label ?label
}

Many thanks to Marguerite Spoerri Butcher for providing the export from CHRE.

Excavation coins added to Levantine Coins Online

About 60 coins with findspots in Israel (50 of which are from excavations) have been added into Levantine Coins Online. The excavation coins are from KAMAT (Staff Officer for Archaeology – Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria) and the Israel Antiquities Authority, and the remaining coins are from private collections.

Yehud type 24 has the largest representation of physical specimens, with a handful from excavations.

Yehud 24 with findspots

The findspots have also propagated into the broader numismatic network graph in Nomisma.org, with findspots visible in the maps of individual concepts relating to Yehud coinage.

Distribution of finds of Yehud Medinata