Coinage of the Roman Republic Online: Something for Roman Numismatists to “CRRO” about

[Ethan Gruber]

Today, in collaboration with the British Museum and the Münzkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the ANS launches another major new tool to aid in the identification, research and cataloging of the coins of the ancient world. 

Coinage of the Roman Republic Online (CRRO) continues the precedent set by Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE) in presenting, in an easily searchable form, all the varieties of the coinage issued in the Roman Republic. Six online collections containing over 20,000 specimens of Roman Republican coinage spread across 2,300 coin types, in addition to hundreds of hoards from Coin Hoard of the Roman Republic (CHRR) and additional individual findspots provided by Berlin are now available for research. 

The site presents a basic description of each published variety based on Michael Crawford’s 1974 publication Roman Republican Coinage (RRC), which remains the primary typology used for the identification of Roman Republican coin types. Since its publication there have been significant revisions to the dating of the series following the discovery of new hoards, but no attempt has been made to reflect these, or to make any other amendments to the published typology at this stage. 

The descriptions are based on the typology set out in RRC, but have been modified to meet the standards of the British Museum’s collection management system by Eleanor Ghey and Ian Leins. These were previously published in Ghey and Leins 2010, which forms an update to the 1910 catalogue of the collection by Grueber. Additional types not in the British Museum’s collection were added to this database by Richard Witschonke of the ANS. 

Many of these coin types are linked to specimens present in the British Museum’s collection, Münzkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the ANS, and elsewhere, and where available, to images. Searches are made straightforward through a series of facets, presented in a way that will already be familiar to users of other ANS search tools. Traditional searches of familiar numismatic categories such as obverse and reverse legends and types are provided, as well as the ability to search by deity, in the hope that CRRO will provide an identification tool useful to collectors, dealers, curators, and field archaeologists. Researchers can now list all coin types found within a country and any regional division below the country (E.g., Liguria, down to the town or city). 

ANS database developer, Ethan Gruber, says that, "like OCRE and all of our other digital projects at the ANS, CRRO uses Linked Open Data methodologies to aggregate information from disparate institutions and present the information in an interface available in more than 10 languages with advanced mapping and metrical analysis features. CRRO is a fully functional research portal for Roman Republican numismatics." 

The ANS acknowledges the contribution of Michael Crawford to the project, and also thanks Michael Sharp of Cambridge University Press for allowing us to use the numbering system of Roman Republican Coinage. 

For further information contact Joanne Isaac or call (212) 571 4470 ext. 112.

[Richard Light]

Hi,

This looks really good as regards the item descriptions, but I don't see how to get to the underlying typology as Linked Data.  Is it possible?

While looking, I have found the nomisma.org ontology.  This is great in that it is a SKOS-based Linked Data resource, but there seems to be less cohesion within it than I would ideally like.  For example, there isn't a skos:conceptScheme (or two) to tie the whole thing together, with appropriate skos:inScheme links pointing to the concept scheme.  Also, the information in the various serializations isn't consistent.  The turtle serialization of ephesus includes the assertion that it is an instance of a mint, while the RDF/XML one lacks this information.

Richard

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Richard Light

[Ethan Gruber]

Nomisma.org grew organically beginning in 2010 without a rigorous set of rules. Within two weeks, the new nomisma.org will be launched in a completely new architecture with a new OWL ontology (authored primarily by Karsten Tolle at the University of Frankfurt), with properties and classes that conform to the standards established by the semantic web community. The Turtle delivered in the current framework is from the RDFa 1.1 distiller. In the new framework, RDF/XML, Turtle, and JSON-LD are completely consistent. If you are interested in reading more about the new framework, I wrote a paper for CAA 2014 on Kerameikos.org, which is nearly architecturally identical to nomisma: https://www.academia.edu/9739936/Linked_Open_Greek_Pottery

As for data availability, there are links to the dumps in the Pelagios v3 data model and the [old] nomisma model on the CRRO home page. You can also get a variety of serializations via conneg and REST. See more information at http://numismatics.org/crro/apis

By early February, CRRO, OCRE, and all of our other projects will have shifted to exporting into the new nomisma ontology.

Best,
Ethan

[Richard Light]

Brilliant: thank you!

Richard

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Richard Light