Eight Years of Nomisma.org: Past, Present, and Future
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 26/09/2020

Nomisma.org is an international collaboration to define the intellectual concepts of numismatics following the principles of Linked Open Data (LOD). Established in 2010 as a proof of concept, the project has grown considerably since then. While technical aspects of the project have been published at previous CAA conferences, beginning with “Semantic Web Technologies Applied to Numismatic Collections” at CAA 2012 in Southampton, this paper is focused primarily on Nomisma’s evolution as a community, without which these technical achievements would not have been possible. Beginning as an informal discussion about numismatic data standards at the British Museum in 2011, the first official European Coin Find Network - Nomisma joint meeting occurred in Frankfurt the following year with 15 participants. The seventh iteration of this meeting was held earlier this year in Valencia, drawing 60 participants working in Gre-co-Roman,  Medieval  European,  and  Islamic  numismatics.  Likewise,  the  Nomisma  scientific  committee has established discipline-specific working groups, enabling the expansion of the scope of the LOD thesaurus into other periods and cultures beyond its Greco-Roman founda-tion. Similarly, many international numismatic projects have been built on the Nomisma infra-structure: more than 30 museums and archaeological datasets have contributed data for nearly 200,000 physical specimens to date, a significant enhancement since CAA 2012. This paper will summarize Nomisma’s progress since 2010 with an eye on what the future holds for the project.


Ethan Gruber, Sebastian Heath, Andrew Meadows, David Wigg-Wolf