I never liked OCRE's design principle thinking it ill-suited for coins (for many reasons) but now I see that the ANS's database has been retrofitted using the same bones as OCRE. I know that people, for the most part, tend to use whatever they start out with because they learn the system and get comfortable with it. Knowing this I'm expecting that OCRE and the ANS must have its hardcore fans. My question is, how is OCRE's setup in particular an advantage to other databases? There are technical reasons why how the data is structured make it modern and easier for machines to digest but I'm hoping to hear from the regular user's point of view. In the interest of full disclosure I'm totally biased having designed and maintained three different coin sites. My very first internet exposure was to Wildwinds and to me it just seemed natural that a database should be indexed in order to be truly useful. But that's maybe my weakness. It got so ingrained in me that any other way seems wrong. It could be that OCRE's system is ultimately better for organizing large amounts of data and that someday all new major projects will adopt this system. A broader question: what do you like and dislike about the online tools you use most frequently? What innovation would you like to see? Rasiel
I just want something easy to use. As much as I like all of the information available on the ANS site I find actual searches to be excruciating. It seems like any time you try to refine a search it fouls up the search. I am an ANS member but use their sight for research as a last resort.
Internally, the ANS database includes a powerful web query language, SPARQL. The documentation makes it look fantastic: http://nomisma.org/documentation/sparql I learned a bit of SPARQL but unfortunately the ANS does not expose a SPARQL query endpoint so it is not possible to run custom queries. The Nomisma.org ontology is rich enough to support the museum community. I expect it is goo enough for the kinds of data you host. The ANS software is open source and can be downloaded from https://github.com/ewg118/numishare . I wasn't able to get it working the one afternoon I tried several years ago. I don't have enough numismatic data to make it worthwhile to host my own content site. I do have the time and skills to put together front-ends, but no public endpoints to play with. Regarding front-ends, the feature I want is integration with Wiki software so that users can collaborate on adding comments. Even simple comments would be an improvement. Zeno.ru does comments, as does ForgeryNetwork.com. I haven't found Greek and Roman coin sites that allow comments on individual coins. AsiaMinorCoins.com supports comments, but only for logged in users, and there has never been public sign up.
I don't mind OCRE and use it often . I like it better for ease of searching than RPC online, but I like that you can submit your own example coins to RPC for inclusion.
Chris - so why DO you use it if it's torture? Ed - Thanks you so much for this detailed response. I took a brief look at the link to the SPARQL query examples and the query structure is very similar to MySQL (which is likely far more commonly used). In your opinion is there a clear advantage between the two technologies? In any case, I think for most of us what we care about is the front end. ANS (and OCRE) are downright user hostile as far as I'm concerned. The frustration that prompted this thread came from trying to do a lookup on coins of Delmatius. ANS inexplicably returned all of three records while OCRE retrieved zero. Obviously, I must be doing something wrong..... but that's sort of my whole point. How hard should it be to find records this simple? It makes all the filtering options meaningless. In your response though you bring up an interesting possibility: I agree that there's nothing quite like querying the database directly. That's like having God Mode enabled. However, I think (I could be wrong) that putting it out there for anyone to use poses serious security threats. I exaggerate but you can see how someone might be tempted to enter, say, something like SELECT * FROM user_passwords. Even if you could lock the backend tables a poorly scripted query can literally crash the server. Is there a safe way to implement this that can somehow keep an eye on the CPU usage? I just checked out Zeno.ru. It looks like it's exclusively from Islam westwards. I'm so happy these civs are getting some attention. I felt guilty about deep-sixing them for lack of knowledge and perceived interest. If this is your area of focus I don't have much to offer but both tantaluscoins.com and coryssa.org have record comments enabled in the Greco-Roman world side of things. Thanks again - I hope to see more comments! Rasiel
I always thought OCRE and ANS had kinda unreliable search features. They seem to miss things. Even if it's ostensibly more powerful, it's not very user friendly. I prefer RPC; it has a powerful search, the narrowing criteria seem to be reliable, and it also has an indexed and map view. It's also very easy to submit comments for corrections or additions, which are always promptly addressed. OCRE and ANS, on the other hand, don't seem to have any way to reach out or improve the data. I don't see the RPC site cited too much, so I feel like it's a really underutilized source.
Sharp looking site! I can see why I'd never seen it before... I know RP's about as well as quantum mechanics. But regardless anyone can appreciate the work that goes into something like this when the user interface is so polished. The mint map as a way to quickly see a mint's output is a touch of genius; I gotta crib that! The filtering page is indeed very powerful. You can basically craft a complex query without having to understand any code. I can't see a site like this tossing all that elegance out the window to migrate to the ANS's way of doing things even if in theory it's a more modern approach. Or, again, maybe I'm missing a big part of the picture. Rasiel
Rasiel, try "Dalmatius" instead of "Delmatius" and you will find the coins. The problem is not so much the database, but the data. They used the less common spelling (at least in numismatics) "Dalmatius" instead of "Delmatius". BTW, if you are not happy with the interface, you may want to download the datasets (http://nomisma.org/datasets) and create your own interface Simon
Aha! That's a good point. Didn't think of that ;- ) I know the ANS devs are chronically underfunded so I realize it's a bit unfair to be pushy. Hopefully these glitches will get ironed out over time. Rasiel
An interesting thread. As someone who has only been researching ancients online for about 3 years, this is kind of a newbie observation, but I thought I'd put out an example. I recently got a low-grade sestertius of Hadrian showing the emperor raising up a personification of Africa - RESTITVTORI AFRICAE a travel series type on the cheap. When I first started a couple years ago, Wildwinds was my main source of information, and I still enjoy using the site, but there are gaps. This coin is a good example of this - it is listed as RIC 941, which is basically correct. But... An OCRE search shows five variations of this RESTITVTORI AFRICAE, RIC 940 (which is described wrong) and four variations of RIC 941. The differences have to do with bust types. Mine is laureate, facing right, which makes it RIC 941f (I think). http://numismatics.org/ocre/results...rait_facet:"Hadrian"+AND+fulltext:RESTITVTORI At this point, I tried to find other attributions noting the "f" in RIC 941f. Interestingly, most sources - including the Big Auction Houses and Vcoins - don't bother with the full attributions, and just list RIC 941 for this laureate type. No big deal, but OCRE is the way to go for full attribution in this case. That being said, OCRE is not perfect. I find a lot of mistakes, usually in the examples used for a given type - wrong bust type, inscriptions, etc. In the link above, note RIC 940 is described as "laureate bust right" but shows a single example - with a bare-headed bust left! So is mine RIC 940? Also, I have to wonder if there are such things as 941b, d, g, h, i - none of which come up in the search. Identical descriptions for different types is also frustrating to me as well - although I find other sources can be confusing this way as well. In the example above, RIC 940 and RIC 941f have identical descriptions (but the photos are completely different). And as noted in the OP, LRB searches in OCRE I find very awkward - Wildwinds is usually easier, and faster. Here's my (very) humble Hadrian: As for RPC, I find it very difficult to use - but when I can get it to work, it is great. It is one of those databases that seems to work best when I already know what I am searching for - and if I already knew that, I wouldn't be searching a database! But my computer skills are very poor, so the fault is probably with me. I really like using acsearch - I get a lot of hits with a minimal of information. Like Wildwinds, it is only as good as its contributing auctions, but it is often my go-to source for non-Imperial Roman stuff. Coin Archives, FORVM, Vcoins are other places I go.
Oh, but what about MAIJMU? (= "Mysterious Acronym I Just Made Up", just for revenge, since I saw at least two acronyms in here that I was utterly clueless about.)
Personally, I find OCRE, though difficult sometimes, easier to use than the British Museum site search engine. That one has me totally flummoxed, which is a shame because of the wealth of their collection.
What I realy like is the possibility to refine your search step by step. e.g. starting with "Antoninus Pius" > 2456 results refine: denomination "As" (Other search engines have problems with "As" and bring a lot of results containg the word "as" not the denomination > 451 results refine: Fortuna > down to 15 results refine: COS IIII > only three results coin found
As a user, I see the friendliness largely a matter of how the system handles variations. Will a search for SEP SEV return a listing as SEPS EV (many coins have this split)? Google tries hard to guess what we were thinking. The CNG search must be spelled correctly. Dalmatius is a good point here. There are also many later Roman coins with H looking A's so searches have to be aware of things that might impede connection between input and users. I find the comments section on acsearch interesting because they allow a seller to turn off comments for their sales. I started leaving a few comments when I first discovered the capability but stopped when I saw so few people using it. Perhaps some are turned off by the subscription system. A comment: https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=5650131 Needs one: https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=2733653 Databases are no better than their data. Users of sales compilation sites need to realize that the data as supplied by sellers might need editing. I see this as too big a job to expect the site owner to do alone.
I never use OCRE for attribution of Roman imperial coins; I have RIC, BMCRE, Sear, and others. I only use it to see examples from museum collections for purposes of die studies or to see stylistic variations. It frequently is in error about varieties, such as bust types or titulature in the inscriptions.
SPARQL is designed to merge data from different sources. https://www.cambridgesemantics.com/blog/semantic-university/learn-sparql/sparql-vs-sql/ . However, many SPARQL implementations use MySQL underneath. Regarding performance and hackery, Wikidata.org has a public endpoint so there must be some way to control throughput. I did forget about Tantalus. I just did a password reset and will try it again. I picked two coins and random and although both had a "comment" link no comments were being accepted for either coin. Zeno has a small section for Black Sea area coins you might know at https://www.zeno.ru/showgallery.php?cat=1285 but it isn't well organized. It is a Russian site and focuses on Asia. I brought it up because I like the hierarchical arrangement, comments open to logged in users on everything, and each category has its own text. The ANS is a scholarly institution. The have one guy doing those sites. His blog is http://numishare.blogspot.com . The ANS can get papers published in heritage publications discussing data formats. There isn't anywhere that publishes papers on really slick user interaction. They really are advancing the field for library science and querying heritage data. Eventually they will allow open queries and then people with your skills will be able to come in. The innovations I like to see are about linking data from different sites. 20 years ago I put the most famous book on Greek coins online, then worked with David Surber at Wildwinds to provide a deep link on every page. I believe the rules of CoinTalk ban promoting our own sites, but I want to talk about my site http://isegrim.mybluemix.net . There is an amazing German site with a query interface much more difficult than OCRE. You can find it at http://isegrim.dasr.de/isegrim/index_en.html . It was started by Ottfried von Vacano in the 1980s. It was the first site with a "Semantic" interface. It only had what you call "God mode". Not only that, but humans entered coins using an ontology so you could search for "Apollo" but also for "Male" if you didn't recognize the figure on the coin. I thought it was amazing but none of my collector friends could figure out the weird German query tags, the old-fashioned spelling of city names, or the Latinization of the Greek inscriptions. I spent a weekend doing a modern front-end for it. There are a lot of bugs in the front-end. The thing I am most proud of is nothing on the UI, but that you can share results by copying the URL out of the browser. (I realize Tantalus also has this, but it doesn't have advanced queries). I also mixed in a little linking with Google Books so if the result is in the British Museum Greek coin catalogs a direct link is provided. The ANS's underlying platform is good. It would be easy to write an RDF relationship explaining which gods are "male" and which are "female" and allow the ANS data to be queried. The ANS is trying, but they only have a few people thinking about what to do. Read the blog post about adding monograms for Alexander coins to PELLA. http://numishare.blogspot.com/2019/12/1200-hellenistic-monograms-posted-to.html It is going to be great. I have some ideas for improving that but don't know how to contribute. Have you used Pella? Again, my favorite thing about it is the stable URLs. If I want to study an Alexander coin, say for example Price #9, I can go to http://numismatics.org/pella/id/price.9 and see examples from the world's museums. Imagine how handy it would be if your engine, whenever it saw `Price (#)<n>` in the References field made it into a hyperlink? We would rarely need to pull down Martin Price's book from the top shelf.
Sorry Ed I don't know how to do multi-quote replies on here so sorry the sloppy cut-and-paste I did forget about Tantalus. I just did a password reset and will try it again. Tantalus has been on autopilot pretty much the last 10 years. I migrated a lot of the records to Coryssa. However, since I made it freely accessible without login the commenting doesn't have a way to know who's who and probably only retrieves the IP as author. Coryssa is the project I actively fund and where it could conceivably grow to cover other periods like Asia and Medieval. These used to be there but were not receiving any attention so I just deleted them rather than let records pile up. If you or someone else wanted to use it they could be revived. Records from elsewhere could be imported. Have you used Pella? Never heard of it. I went to the link you provided and again am seeing a beautiful map and various records but am lost. No fault of the UI but simply that this is not my area of expertise. Greek is Terra Incognita for me (to say nothing of Islamic and Asian; another alien world altogether!) In reviewing ANS and these new sites I see areas where I could improve. For one, I see that there's a good deal of attention placed on diameter. This would be easy enough to implement by scraping and parsing the text descriptions. I'm still intrigued by your quasi-suggestion of enabling full on direct querying. There's been many times when in frustration I've gone this route but it's always bit scary. You really need to know what you're doing. These are skills that not many coin geeks would have any reason to know. Rasiel
