Berlin coins updated in OCRE and CRRO

The Berlin LIDO/XML export data for Roman Imperial Coinage references has been reprocessed, and coins from the Münzkabinett from Valerian through Quintillus are now available in OCRE. The number of imperial coins from Berlin grew about 150 to 3,749. Additionally, the RRC export was reprocessed into RDF following the new Nomisma ontology, and the total number of Republican coins from Berlin available in CRRO has grown to 1,080. The ANS coins for RIC V were updated yesterday, and the University of Virginia coins just before that. I expect to update the RIC V coins from the British Museum in the near future. This will add over 2,000 more coins to OCRE.

Presently, nearly 35,000 coins from the ANS, British Museum, Berlin, and the University of Virginia are available in OCRE. I expect the first batch of archaeological materials from Antike Fundmünzen in Europa (AFE) to be ingested into the Nomisma triplestore soon. This is a tremendous milestone.

All RIC types through Quintillus published in OCRE

Last week, we published all of the types from Valerian and Gallienus in OCRE. A few days ago, we added Claudius Gothicus and Quintillus. There is a subtle difference between the types from the reigns of Valerian and Gallienus and the emperors after 268 in our RIC V workflow. Due to the tremendous number of subtypes from Valerian and Gallienus (and subtypes of these subtypes, when considering every permutation of obverse portrait and mint mark), we decided we needed to speed up the publication process. Beginning with Claudius Gothicus, only the parent type numbers will be published to OCRE so that we will complete RIC Volume X by the close of the NEH grant two years from now. If/when we have the time, we will return to RIC V to fill in the missing subtypes.

Capturing the parent types is of the utmost importance, since most museum and archaeological databases will likely have designated their coins as a parent type, e.g. Gallienus 210, and not Gallienus 210k or Gallienus 210k Subtype 1. The ANS has gone into this level of granularity with respect to linking coins to OCRE subtypes (as have I with linking the University of Virginia collection), but it is doubtful anyone else has. Indeed, at first glance, neither Berlin nor the British Museum link to the subtypes, many of which were not distinctly numbered within RIC. [As an aside, Mantis and UVa have been updated to link to OCRE, but BM and Berlin coins are not yet available.]

However, in order to support the traversal from parent types to subtypes, I have made some enhancements to the OCRE UI (which are not inherent to Numishare). It is possible to link directly to Gallienus 210 and have those coins show up under "Examples of this Type" in the parent record page, but coins linked more granularly to subtypes will also show up under the "Subtypes" section underneath. Click on the Gallienus 210, 210k, and 210k.1 above for an example. What this means is that an archaeological database can link to the parent type when the legend or mint marks are not legible enough for precise identification, but the numismatic data and images can still be made available through OCRE.

In semantic web terms, subtypes are linked to parent types via the skos:broader property. SPARQL queries have been updated throughout Numishare to infinitely gather subtypes with the skos:broader+ modifier, which is enabled by default in the current version of Fuseki we employ as the Nomisma.org SPARQL endpoint (http://bit.ly/1N2pe81).

SPARQL Examples for the DCMI/ASIS&T Webinar

I have create a number of gits for the SPARQL examples I plan to go over in my DCMI/ASIS&T webinar.

The slideshow is available on Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/ewg118/from-0-to-60-in-sparql-in-50-minutes.

It is available for download in ODP and PPTX.

1. Query labels for nm:rome
2. Get information about nm:rome
3. Get information about nm:rome with semicolons 
4. Get labels, order alphabetally 
5. Filter by English label 
6. Get a list of mints 
7. Visualizing Greek coin production 
8. Get a list of objects with the RRC 273/1 type 
9. Get weight and diameter (required) for objects of RRC 273/1 
10. Get optional weight, diameter, and depiction of RRC 273/1 coins 
11. Get average weight of RRC 273/1 coins 
12. Get a list of all silver types in RRC 
13. A list of Roman Republican silver coins (limited to 100) 
14. UNION list of gold and silver coins (limited to 100) 
15. Get a count of all silver coins associated with RRC types 
16. Display mints that issued silver Republican coinage, with count of types, grouped and order by mint name. 
17. Get all findspots for all hoards or coins associated with silver imperial types 
18. Get distinct findspots for silver imperial coinage 
19. Get findspots for denarii minted from 100 to 50 B.C. 
20. SPARQL filter: geographic distribution of Jupiter coins minter after A.D. 1 
21. Spatial SPARQL: hoards found within 50 km of Athens 

Clarifying licenses in Mantis

As many of you might know, several ANS projects, like OCRE and CRRO, already have well-defined Open Database Licenses. In the ANS database itself, Mantis, we had a generic copyright and terms of use statement. We have moved forward with clarifying the licenses on Mantis. The data are made freely and openly available with an Open Database License. The images themselves are now under the Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commerical license. People are free to link to our coin images from external sites and projects. While this may have been going on anyway, we have now formalized the right to do this.

Nomisma extended to link to the Getty ULAN, British Museum thesauri

This morning, the Getty Museum announced the release of the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) thesaurus as linked open data. Following updates made to the Getty lookup mechanism in Kerameikos.org's XForms-based editing interface, I have ported these updates into Nomisma's editor. It is now possible to quickly and easily link people and organizations in Nomisma to matching concepts in the ULAN, much like what we have already implemented for linking mints and regions to the TGN and denominations, materials, manufacture methods, and object types to the AAT.

Furthermore, I took the time to finally fully implement the British Museum lookup mechanism in Nomisma. The British Museum thesauri cover many of the same broad categories as the Getty, but the main difference between the two systems is that the BM thesauri reflect what they have in their own database, and the Getty thesauri are aimed at representing concepts across all of art history. The Nomisma editing interface now enables quick and easy linking to denominations, ethnic identities, manufacture methods, materials, mints, object types, people, and regions in the BM thesauri.

See the following examples:

http://nomisma.org/id/drachma
http://nomisma.org/id/alexander_iii
http://nomisma.org/id/antiocheia_syria

When creating or editing ids manually, we'll be able to easily add BM and Getty URIs into the system. Ideally we will want to do a mass update of all of our ids that can be mapped to concepts in both thesauri. Creating a concordance between Nomisma and Getty concepts will hopefully facilitate large-scale aggregation in the future.

Major photographic updates to OCRE

Much progress has been made recently in photographically covering the American Numismatic Society collection for the Roman imperial department. By using some NEH funding to hire a photographer to focus mainly on Roman imperial coins in a more high-speed workflow, photos for more than 7,000 Roman imperial coins have been captured over the last six months or so.

These images have finally pushed through the main image processing workflow and are now available online. The Nomisma.org SPARQL endpoint has been updated with the latest dump from Mantis to reflect these additions. Furthermore, more than 1,100 new links to OCRE have been made from the ANS collection from RIC Volumes I to IV. Nearly 15,300 coins from the ANS are now linked in OCRE, up from just over 14,000 previously. Furthermore, the photographic coverage has been extended from 3,499 coins in our collection to about 12,000.

Lastly, we have pushed the first portion of RIC Volume V into OCRE. These are the coins from during Valerian's life, from his sole reign to joint reign with his son, Gallienus. We have not yet linked physical specimens from the ANS or other museum collections into these RIC V URIs yet, but look for this to be done in the next week or two. For now, you can take a look at the types at http://numismatics.org/ocre/results?q=recordId:ric.5*.

From 0 to 60 on SPARQL queries in 50 minutes

On Wednesday, May 13, at 10 AM EDT, I will be giving a free webinar sponsored by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and the Association for Information Science & Technology.

This webinar provides an introduction to SPARQL, a query language for RDF. Users will gain hands on experience crafting queries, starting simply, but evolving in complexity. These queries will focus on coinage data in the SPARQL endpoint hosted by http://nomisma.org: numismatic concepts defined in a SKOS-based thesaurus and physical specimens from three major museum collections (American Numismatic Society, British Museum, and Münzkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) linked to these concepts. Results generated from these queries in the form of CSV may be imported directly into Google Fusion Tables for immediate visualization in the form of charts and maps.

This webinar was first presented as a training session in the LODLAM Training Day at SemTech2014. I will cover the basics of an RDF triple, but the presentation assumes some baseline understanding of linked data. The SPARQL queries will begin simply and build in complexity, culminating in spatial queries.

Sign up at http://dublincore.org/resources/training/#webinars