Linking from Citation to Example in Numismatic (and other) Scholarship

I let myself follow a tangent today. It starts with noting that the article by C. Lorber and A. Meadows that I'm preparing for publication "Review of Ptolemaic Numismatics" makes frequent reference to coin types described in J. Svoronos, Ta nomismata tou kratous ton Ptolemaion. Athens, 1904-1908. It is an obvious feature of such a publication that those references lead readers to information about those coins.

To start on the journey towards such linking, I created URIs for all coin types defined in Svoronos' typology at nomisma.org. See http://nomisma.org/id/svoronos-1904-1000. There's very little description there, and what is there is cribbed from C. Lorber's translation at http://www.coin.com/images/dr/svoronos_text.html.

Now, if you go to this paragraph in Lorber and Meadows, which makes reference to Svoronos, you'll see that the link to "Sv. 1424" is live. Look towards the end of the paragraph. And note that it's possible to refer to single <p> elements in the article. That's because each one has an @id with a unique value. That's cool and important.

Follow the link to http://nomisma.org/id/svoronos-1904-1424 and you'll see further links to the ANS collection and to coinproject.com. The former is a rock-solid stable URI but the coin hasn't been photographed (hint, hint). The latter is to an interesting project that is digitizing a type corpora for many series of coins. As the editor of ISAW Papers I don't have to worry if it's super-stable. I rely on nomisma.org to provide reasonable links and to keep them current.

The end result is a hint of a richly linked and illustrated future. Again, cool. I'd like to cross-the-bridge (as it were) and deliver images of Sv. 1424 while readers are still within the "environment" of Lorber and Meadows. But the first step is implementing such links, then we can work on the user experience.

In other news.... there is now a github for ISAW Papers at http://github.com/sfsheath/isaw-papers.

SPARQL Based Navigation of RDFa Encoded Named Entities

This is a quick heads up on a new feature at Nomisma.org, the ANS-hosted project assigning stable URIs to numismatic concepts.

At http://nomisma.org/id/lyttus you'll find a very brief representation of the ancient site of Lyttus in Crete. It links to the relevant Wikipedia article and Barrington Atlas ID so it should be unambiguous which site we mean and it should be easy to find out further information. As a convenience, and to make it easy to put a dot on the map, the page also has latlong info.

This post is about the list of URIs prefaced by the text "The following Nomisma IDs refer to this ID:". If you click on http://nomisma.org/id/igch0151, you'll get a description of a hoard of coins as published in Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards.

Nomisma.org uses RDFa so the markup of the hoard includes the snippet: <span rel="nm:mint" resource="lyttus">Lyttus: 1 dr.</span> . You can click on "Show Markup in Page" to see this.

All the descriptions of numismatic concepts are collected in a single RDFa file at http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.xml and as RDF-XML at http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.rdf. That one snippet from igch0151 will produce the triple:
<http://nomisma.org/id/ich0151>
 <http://nomisma.org/id/mint>
 <http://nomisma.org/id/lyttus>

So... visiting http://nomisma.org/id/lyttus queries http://nomisma.org.rdf with a SPARQL statement of the form ' SELECT ?id WHERE { ?id ?refersto <http://nomisma.org/id/lyttus> }'. This just binds "?id" to a list of the ids that refer to Lyttus.

Bottom line: Simple markup achieves meaningful results using pre-existing standards. I wrote none of the tools to make this work. It will be fun when I get around to turning that list of IDs into a map, which will be simple using the Google Maps API. Then we will have a geographic front-end to "SPARQL-based Navigation of RDFa Encoded Named Entities".

Note: all of the RDFa patterns are in the process of being defined and the entries are in the process of being markedup. I.e., this is all in alpha stage.

Various Items

• The list of watchable video episodes at Emerging Cypriot, from the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, continues to grow. The second and third shorts have a lot of ceramic content and are well-worth downloading. The whole idea is great but I have a critique of the presentation. When you go to the site, the titles of the not yet released episodes are shown but you have to mouse-over thumbnail images representing the available ones to see what you're going to get. This is odd and may prioritize the visual effect triggered by the mouse-over rather than the experience of a user trying to find a particular episode. When they are all released, it will be hard to find any one title.
• The PDF of F. de Callataÿ and H. Gitler's The Coin of Coins
illustrates a nice overlap between ceramic and numismatic imagery on page 38.
• Gabriel Bijovsky's article A Byzantine Gold Hoard from Bet She'an from the American Numismatic Society Magazine has images of sixth to seventh century ceramics as well. The full publication of the hoard is in Revue Numismatique 158 (2002).