CAA2016

An Ontology for a Numismatic Island with Bridges to Others

Karsten Tolle, David Wigg-Wolf, Ethan Gruber

Abstract
Nomisma.org is a collaborative project to provide stable digital representations of numismatic concepts according to the principles of Linked Open Data. These take the form of http URIs that also provide access to machine-readable information about those concepts, along with links to other resources. We have also constructed an Ontology for representing concepts in our thesaurus, and this has been applied to digital representations of physical specimens, enabling linking between specimens in Nomisma-defined numismatic concepts.
In our presentation we will describe the processes by which we designed this Ontology with a view to allowing the highest possible flexibility and therefore reducing the barriers to using it. It must be stressed that designing the Ontology was a long-lasting process and is still ongoing. It was often challenging to combine existing requirements and to solve misunderstandings between different parties.
We will further present how the Nomisma.org Ontology is used from three different viewpoints. For each viewpoint we will also demonstrate how the numismatic data are already linked to other data sources, thesauri, gazetteers or systems, such as Zenon (http://zenon.dainst.org/), Geonames, or others. The goal here is to enable and show how this can be used to combine different archaeological areas with our numismatic data.
The back-end system of Nomisma.org: We provide information how we handle data, imports and maintenance issues. 
Providers of numismatic datasets: Nomisma.org provides the ability to others to publish their RDF datasets (based on the Ontology and with additional modelling requirements) via the Nomisma.org site. For the maintenance of datasets we use Vocabulary of Interlinked Datasets (VoID). 
We will furthering addition present how the Ontology is currently used by actors outside Nomisma.org (Online Coins of the Roman Empire, Antike Fundmuenzen Europa, Portable Antiquities Scheme, and others) in order to connect numismatic data between different sources.