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Asia Minor encompassing An Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards (IGCH), Coin Hoards (CH) volumes 1-10, as well as some yet-unpublished materials.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.