Numismatics: a case study in Linked Data

Andrew Meadows

The American Numismatic Society

What’s so good about coins?

Moses Finley, The Ancient Economy

‘The Greek passion for coins, and for beautiful coins at that, is well known and sometimes misunderstood. For a long time this passion

was not shared by many of their most advanced neighbours… because it was

essentially a political phenomenon, “a piece of local vanity, patriotism, or advertisement with

no far-reaching importance”’

Moses Finley, The Ancient Economy

‘The Greek passion for coins, and for beautiful coins at that, is well known and sometimes misunderstood. For a long time this passion

was not shared by many of their most advanced neighbours… because it was

essentially a political phenomenon, “a piece of local vanity, patriotism, or advertisement with

no far-reaching importance”’

Wrong, Wrong Wrong !

The Evidentiary Power of Coinage

Known point of origin (Places)

Known issuer (People; roles)

Known point of discovery

(Places; contexts)

Decorated (Iconographic vocabulary)

LIMC ??

Inscribed (Titulature;Text)ΤΥΡΟΥΙΕΡΑΣΚΑΙΑΣΥΛΟΥ

SPQR ImperatoriCaesari Quod ViaeMunitaeSunt Ex Ea PecuniaQuae IussuSenatus Ad AerariumDelataEst

Quantifiable (Statistics)

Civic coin production, 450-400 BC

Athens

Sicyon Ephesus . Sparta

Quantifiable (Statistics)

Monetary Unification, W. Asia Minor, 450-400 BC

c. 550-480 BC c. 480-400 BC c. 400-320 BC

Monetary unification in W. Asia Minor, 550-320 BC

Good News: it survives in huge quantities

Collection Approx No.

New York 200, 000

London 200, 000

Berlin 200, 000

Paris 200, 000

Vienna 100, 000

PAS 300, 000

Total 1 Million +

Bad News: it survives in huge quantities

• Over 20 collections of 20,000+ ancient coins

• At least 5 different national Fundmünzenschemes

• All catalogue in their own systems, with their own standards, in their own languages

• All are at different stages in their digital journeys

It gets worse…

• Many of the standard catalogues and corpora are more than 50 years old

• None of them exist digitally

• There is no international co-ordinating body for their creation

An attempt at an answer

Nomisma.org is a collaborative effort to provide stable digital representations of numismatic

concepts and entities

Coalition of the Willing (Current collaborators):Paris: the Sorbonne, the BibliothèqueNationale

Berlin: Staatliche Museenzu Berlin, BBAW

Frankfurt: Römisch-GermanischeKommission, DAI

Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum

London: PAS, the British Museum

New York, ANS

The shape of the answer

Nomisma.org provides a short, often recognizable, URI for each resource it defines and presents the related information in both

human and machine readable form.

Creators of digital content can use these stable URIs to build a web of linked knowledge that

enables faster acquisition and analysis of well-structured numismatic data.

Hoards Finds

Corpora/Mint studies

Collections

Specimen

Specimen

Specimen

SpecimenSpecimen

Reference

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