Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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exist<strong>in</strong>g standards and promotes the development of new standards for the numismatic community.
The current major project of the network is the ref<strong>in</strong>ement and extension of the Numismatic Database
Standard (NUDS), 450 and they are “work<strong>in</strong>g to def<strong>in</strong>e a standardized set of fields to describe
numismatic objects with<strong>in</strong> the context of a column-oriented database.” The network recognizes that
there are already thousands of records of numismatics objects <strong>in</strong> traditional relational databases so they
plan to create a set of shared fields 451 that will promote exchange of data and are develop<strong>in</strong>g a NUDS
testbed.
In addition to data <strong>in</strong>tegration, the need to support more sophisticated digital publications <strong>in</strong>
numismatics will be another challenge for any developed <strong>in</strong>frastructure. The ANS has recently
announced a digital publications project 452 and, accord<strong>in</strong>g to their announcement, they are “develop<strong>in</strong>g
an <strong>in</strong>frastructure for the digital publication of numismatic catalogs, exhibitions, articles, and other
materials.” The system will take advantage of standards and schemas that are already available so text
will be encoded us<strong>in</strong>g XML (with TEI DTDs and schemas where appropriate). They have a number of
experimental digital publications, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g a prelim<strong>in</strong>ary HTML map of m<strong>in</strong>ts, 453 a grow<strong>in</strong>g catalog
of “Numismatic Literature” that cont<strong>in</strong>ues their annual list<strong>in</strong>g of numismatic titles, and a number of
HTML catalogs of exhibits and traditional publications.
The most advanced of the ANS digital publications, however, is Nomisma.org, 454 a jo<strong>in</strong>t effort by the
ANS, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Paris-Sorbonne University to “provide stable digital
representations of numismatic concepts and entities” such as generic concepts like a “co<strong>in</strong> hoard” or
actual hoards listed <strong>in</strong> published collections such as the Inventory of Greek Co<strong>in</strong> Hoards (IGCH).
Nomisma.org provides stable URIs 455 for the resources it <strong>in</strong>cludes and, <strong>in</strong> the spirit of “l<strong>in</strong>ked data,” 456
def<strong>in</strong>es and presents the <strong>in</strong>formation <strong>in</strong> both human- and mach<strong>in</strong>e-readable forms. All resources are
represented <strong>in</strong> XML, and they also plan to use XHTML with embedded RDFa. The hope is that
creators of other digital collections will use these stable URIs to build a web of l<strong>in</strong>ked data “that
enables faster acquisition and analysis of well-structured numismatic data.” For a test case,
Nomisma.org is develop<strong>in</strong>g a digital version of the IGCH, and all of the 2,387 hoards have been given
stable URIs. The IGCH was chosen because the hoards identified with<strong>in</strong> it have unique identifiers that
are well known to the community and hoards are typically conceived as lists of l<strong>in</strong>ks to other
numismatic entities (the m<strong>in</strong>ts of co<strong>in</strong>s and f<strong>in</strong>dspots). This presents the opportunity of def<strong>in</strong><strong>in</strong>g
encod<strong>in</strong>g conventions for these entities and for then turn<strong>in</strong>g the <strong>in</strong>formation <strong>in</strong>to explicit hyperl<strong>in</strong>ks.
There was surpris<strong>in</strong>gly limited research regard<strong>in</strong>g digitization strategies for co<strong>in</strong>s and the development
of digital collections <strong>in</strong> numismatics. One area of grow<strong>in</strong>g research, however, is that of automatic co<strong>in</strong>
recognition. Kampel and Zaharieva (2008) have recently described one state-of-the-art approach:
Fundamental part of a numismatists work is the identification and classification of co<strong>in</strong>s
accord<strong>in</strong>g to standard reference books. The recognition of ancient co<strong>in</strong>s is a highly complex
task that requires years of experience <strong>in</strong> the entire field of numismatics. To date, no optical
recognition system for ancient co<strong>in</strong>s has been <strong>in</strong>vestigated successfully. In this paper, we
450 http://digitalco<strong>in</strong>s.org/<strong>in</strong>dex.php/NUDS:Fields
451 Initial work on the NUDS:Exchange, “an xml schema designed to facilitate the exchange of numismatic <strong>in</strong>formation,” can be found at
http://digitalco<strong>in</strong>s.org/<strong>in</strong>dex.php/NUDS:Exchange_Format
452 http://www.numismatics.org/DigitalPublications/DigitalPublications
453 http://numismatics.org/xml/geography.html
454 http://nomisma.org/
455 For example, http://nomisma.org/id/igch0262
456 For more on publish<strong>in</strong>g l<strong>in</strong>ked data on the web, see Bizer et al. (2007).