Monday, June 27, 2016

RIC 6, 7, 8, and 10 published to OCRE

After filling in gaps in Nomisma IDs necessary for the publication of RIC 10 (including the extension of Numishare to support the creation and publication of monogram URIs with images), we have pushed RIC 6, 7, 8, and 10 into Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE). The symbol publication extension of OCRE can be seen at http://numismatics.org/ocre/symbols. Currently, each image is a PNG file, but will be replaced with SVG soon. We have developed a workflow to covert True Type Fonts representing Roman imperial numismatic symbols provided by Slovenian partners to SVG with a combination of the open source Linux tools, FontForge and Inkscape.

These four volumes represent a huge number of types, increases OCRE's types in excess of 13,000 up to a total that now exceeds 38,000. David Wigg-Wolf is working on the RIC 9 spreadsheet, and we hope to publish both that and the remainder of RIC 5 by the end of the year.

The next task for this OCRE update is to process several thousand images through our workflow and publish the coins in the ANS curatorial database that link to OCRE IDs into Mantis so that they will become available in OCRE via the Nomisma.org SPARQL endpoint.

Monday, June 20, 2016

Archaeological Museum of Münster University joins Nomisma

Thanks to the outreach conducted by the Berlin Münzkabinett and the reuse of their curatorial database platform, the  Archaeological Museum of Münster University has been integrated into the Nomisma.org consortium. There are a little over 40 coins that link to URIs for types published by CRRO, OCRE, and PELLA available so far. Those of you who use the Berlin database will recognize the similarity in the interface. Additionally, like the Berlin collection, the Münster database uses the same export mechanisms. I have updated my PHP scripts for processing Berlin's LIDO exports to make them more generalizable for the entire database framework so that I don't have to maintain multiple scripts for processing minutely different LIDO exports into Nomisma-compliant RDF. The script is available at https://github.com/AmericanNumismaticSociety/migration_scripts/blob/master/mk_scripts/process-exports.php

You can see an example of one of their coins at RRC 473/1, along with coins from the ANS, Berlin, Portable Antiquities Scheme, and the British Museum.