Numismatic News: Greek Department updated in Mantis

Greek Department updated in Mantis

 At long last, the Greek department at the American Numismatic Society (nearly 100,000 objects) has been migrated into CollectiveAccess and updated in our public database, Mantis. The coverage of people, political organizations, denominations, dynasties, etc. among Greek coinage has almost complete coverage in Nomisma.org, and the overall data quality, consistency, and completeness is greatly improved over the previous version of the data from the ANS's decades-old FileMaker database.

Almost 9,000 coins from this department have been linked to URIs published by RPC Online, which has enabled us to incorporate issuer URIs from RPC Online into Mantis, as well as fill gaps in cataloging, such has missing legends and type descriptions, which had not previously been inputted into FileMaker.

Due to the links from people to dynasties and political entities inherent in Nomisma.org linked data, we have been able to leverage these relationships and fill in missing fields, making it possible to search all coins of Parthia, even if only the ruler had previously been named on the coin.

One of the most important advances in data quality is the normalization of many findspots to places defined by Geonames, enabling the extraction of coordinates from Geonames for display in various map interfaces, either for the map showing the mint and findspot for a particular coin, or indexed in Solr for aggregate queries across the entire ANS collection. Over 150 coins in the Greek department are single finds or from excavations. Additionally, hoards are now indexed for query and geographic visualization. Several thousand Greek coins had references to Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards (IGCH) coin hoards which had not been successfully linked to URIs in Coinhoards.org, and so some gaps had been filled. Over 10,000 coins in the department (10% of the ANS's Greek collection) come from IGCH hoards and are therefore mappable in various user interfaces in Mantis. Mints, findspots, and hoards are all available in the Mantis maps interface, and can be refined by various faceted search queries. Point sizes vary based on density of coins related to those places.

Map depicting geographic distribution of Greek department

Some hundreds of Greek coins had previously slipped through the cracks in automated linking to Hellenistic Royal Coinages type URIs in the previous FileMaker-to-Mantis PHP script (due to typos or other inconsistencies that failed to match regular expressions). These have been identified and linked using OpenRefine.

After the republication of the newly-cleaned Greek and Roman departments to Mantis, the RDF export has been refreshed in Nomisma.org, adding several thousand new coins linked to type and coin hoard URIs, as well as propagating individual findspots into Hellenistic Royal Coinages, Online Coins of the Roman Empire, and Coinage of the Roman Republic Online. In total, more than 90,000 Greek and Roman coins have been ingested into the Nomisma SPARQL endpoint, an increase in more than 20,000 due to the integration of RPC Online URIs into our CollectiveAccess database. It should be noted that the RPC Online typology Linked Open Data have not been loaded into Nomisma, so it isn't possible to conduct sophisticated queries on Roman Provincial Coinage within the Nomisma LOD ecosystem (yet).

RIC Trajan 9 depicting findspots from Larnaca, Cyprus.

Aggregate distribution map of imperial coinage issued by Trajan (findspots from Portable Antiquities Scheme and the excavation of Larnaca, Cyprus)