Nomisma: Stable digital representations of numismatic concepts according to the principles of Linked Open Data

Friday, October 23, 2015

Nomisma: Stable digital representations of numismatic concepts according to the principles of Linked Open Data

[First posted in AWOL 2 December 2009, updates 23 October 2015]

Nomisma

Nomisma.org is a collaborative project to provide stable digital representations of numismatic concepts according to the principles of Linked Open Data. These take the form of http URIs that also provide access to reusable information about those concepts, along with links to other resources. The canonical format of nomisma.org is RDF/XML, with serializations available in JSON-LD (including geoJSON-LD for complex geographic features), Turtle, KML (when applicable), and HTML5+RDFa 1.1.
While the URIs provided by nomisma.org are stable, the project is in progress and subject to constant expansion and ongoing correction. This is particularly the case for the information provided about each nomisma.org identifier.
The information provided by nomisma.org has been provided by a wide community of scholars and insitutions.
The project is steered by a committee currently consisting of:

Florence Codine, BnF

Karsten Dahmen, MK Berlin

Ethan Gruber, ANS

Sebastian Heath, NYU ISAW

Chris Howgego, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Andrew Meadows, ANS

Ulrike Peter, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

Daniel Pett, BM PAS

Karsten Tolle, DBIS, University of Frankfurt

David Wigg-Wolf, DAI RGK

Nomisma.org also hosts the Numismatic Description XML Schema
There are two Github repositories associated with the project. The application code is available in https://github.com/nomisma/framework. The RDF/XML data and ontology versions are in https://github.com/nomisma/data.

Example Nomisma.org URIs
Nomisma.org focuses on URIs for concepts that are unique to numismatics or which have a distinct meaning within the discipline. Examples are:

http://nomisma.org/id/axis. The 'axis' is the angular relationship between the obverse and reverse of a coin.

http://nomisma.org/id/ephesus. The 'mint' at Ephesus. Nomisma relates this numismatic concept to other URIs such as wikipedia, Pleiades, Getty thesauri, and the British Museum.

http://nomisma.org/id/quinarius. Nomisma.org maintains lists of Roman and other denominations. To indicate that “quinarius” is a concept within Roman numismatics, the Dublin Core property "dcterms:source" relates this URI to http://nomisma.org/id/roman_numismatics.