After a tremendous amount of work over the last year or more, just
over 4,000 monograms that appear on Greek coinages have been published
as unambiguous URIs on Nomisma.org. These monograms constitute a combination of symbols that appear on Hellenistic Royals Coinages (HRC) and Corpus Nummorum
(CN). Using Computer Vision methodologies employed by Karsten Tolle,
identical monograms were matched across datasets, reducing the number of
monograms published by both projects from 4,500 to 4,000. The potential
matches were vetted by Peter van Alfen and Ulrike Peter. The monogram
URIs in HRC and Corpus Nummorum have been integrated as skos:exactMatch
properties in Nomisma, making it possible to create UNION SPARQL queries
that enable the querying of types (and associated Nomisma concepts)
across these disparate projects. This is a huge advancement in our
ability to study Greek monograms and their meaning on coinage. Even in
Hellenistic Royal Coinages, we did not have the time in the first phase
of the project to disambiguate identical monograms across PELLA, SCO, and PCO, which limited the data and geographic visualization of monograms within their own typological silos.
The
user interfaces in Nomisma.org have been extended to include many of
the features for symbols in the Numishare platform which publishes HRC:
- The Nomisma.org browse page can be filtered to display results only for the http://nomisma.org/symbol/
namespace, and once this filter is active, a user can refine the search
results by Greek and Latin (or other) letters which appear within the
monogram. It is possible to switch to a grid view that makes viewing
monograms more intuitive. If constituent letters have been selected, it
is possible to display a map in a popup window that contains the mints,
hoards, and individual finds associated with the monogram.
 |
| The Nomisma.org browse page showing monograms that consist of several Greek letters. |
- The
page for each monogram will show associated mints, hoard, and
findspots. The size of the mint points vary by the number of types that
produced the monogram.
- The page will show a network graph
rendered in d3 showing the relationship between that monogram and other
monograms that appear on associated coin types. By default, the network
graph shows the most immediate relationships, but it is possible to
click another button to view the secondary relationships.
 |
| The distribution map and network graph of Monogram 1830, uniting different Hellenistic typologies. |
- A
list of types (and photographic examples, if available) will appear.
The type list is downloadable as CSV and sortable by several
categories.
- The SVG graphics associated with each monogram are
in the Public Domain and can be reused for both commercial and
noncommercial publication.
It should be noted that
although thousands of monograms from CN have
been published and integrated into Nomisma, we have yet to reindex the
coin type data from CN that includes their own monogram URIs. As a
result, the data visualizations and type lists in Nomisma only reflect
HRC. Corpus Nummorum type data will be reingested into Nomisma's SPARQL
endpoint in the near future.
After publishing the RDF derived from
the HRC and CN monogram data, the network graph query is formed by
querying a monogram of a particular URI (or its skos:exactMatches) which
appear on the obverse or reverse of a type, and extending those type
queries by including other monogram URIs will appear on those same types
(filtering for matches that conform to the Nomisma symbol concept
scheme).
SELECT ?symbol ?altSymbol ?image ?altImage WHERE {
BIND (<http://nomisma.org/symbol/monogram.01830> as ?symbol)
{?side nmo:hasControlmark ?symbol}
UNION {?side nmo:hasControlmark ?match .
?match ^skos:exactMatch ?symbol}
?type nmo:hasObverse|nmo:hasReverse ?side .
{?side nmo:hasControlmark ?altSymbol}
UNION {?side nmo:hasControlmark ?altMatch .
?altMatch ^skos:exactMatch ?altSymbol }
FILTER (?altSymbol != ?symbol
&& contains(str(?altSymbol), "http://nomisma.org/symbol"))
?symbol crm:P165i_is_incorporated_in ?image .
?altSymbol crm:P165i_is_incorporated_in ?altImage .
}
Such queries can be extended to list mints or authorities
which produced them, and how many types in total are associated with
those concepts. By associating types with Nomisma concepts for
denominations, materials, mints, individual rulers or broader political
organizations, it is possible to query and visualize relationships
between entities in complex ways that simply could not be undertaken
before applying Linked Open Data principles to numismatics.
Once
the Corpus Nummorum data have been updated in Nomisma, I will prepare a
second post discussing more complex use cases with mints and
authorities.
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