Monday 31 October 2011

Adding more Nomisma Annotations to Pelagios: Direct links to Hoards

I've updated the file of annotations that link Nomisma.org and Pleiades URIs. It's available at http://nomisma.org/nomisma.org.pelagios.rdf .

As a reminder, Nomisma.org is a project establishing stable web addresses (URIs) for concepts in numismatics, which is the study of coins. We have simple definitions of mints, as in the page at http://nomisma.org/id/athens. Go there and you'll see there's not yet much information about the ancient mint of Athens itself. You will, however, see a map of hoards in which coins of Athens were recorded. That's important evidence for economic connections in the ancient Mediterranean and beyond.

The first version of the Pelagios-compliant file that Nomisma published made simple "one-to-one" links from Nomisma mint URIs to the relevant Pleiades URIs. I've now updated the file so that all hoards are linked to the Pleiades URIs of the mints of coins within them. Or at least to the Pleiades URIs that we've entered to date. As in, the following XML excerpt indicates that hoard http://nomisma.org/id/igch0039 is linked to the Pleiades URI http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885.


  <rdf:Description rdf:ID="igch0039">
    <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://www.openannotation.org/ns/Annotation"/>
    <oac:hasBody rdf:resource="http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885"/>
    <oac:hasTarget rdf:resource="http://nomisma.org/id/igch0039"/>
    <dcterms:creator rdf:resource="http://nomisma.org/"/>
    <dcterms:title>Nomisma.org annotation linking http://nomisma.org/id/igch0039 to http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/579885</dcterms:title>
  </rdf:Description>

It's important to note that the annotation doesn't make the nature of the relationship clear. As in, there's no suggestion here that the URI http://nomisma.org/id/igch0039 is itself an alternate definition of Athens. The annotation only says that http://nomisma.org/id/igch0039 makes reference to or adds to our understanding of Athens. In this case, the additional information is that coins of Athens are found in that place. But once this new file is ingested, it will be up to the user to click through from the Pelagios browser to find out why the annotation was made. That's the case for all the varied information that is making its way into the rich Pleagios ecosystem.

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