A significant part of Numista's recent technical developments in its numismatic catalog has focused on structuring the data to enhance its quality and consistency.
When the catalog was started 17 years ago, all fields were free text. As the catalog grew, this approach presented challenges and we progressively replaced many fields with structured data. The latest to date is series.
On Numista, series are a way to group closely related coins, for example, the 50 State Quarters Program and the Dutch Gold Rider. Instead of having a free text field for each coin where a series name could be entered, we built a database of series, which can be associated with the coins.
This approach offers several benefits for data quality:
- Storing the series once and reusing it for multiple coins ensures a certain level of consistency, which would otherwise be impossible to reach as 3000 people contribute to Numista in a year.
- Additional data can be attached to the series, such as descriptions, cross-references with Wikidata, etc.
- Translations into the 8 languages supported by Numista are facilitated, as each series needs to be translated only once rather then for each individual coin.
- It provides better visibility over the series, making it easier to identify and correct errors and inconsistencies.
Only a few free text fields remain, primarily for coin descriptions and titles. Our next objective for catalog architecture is to bring structure to the descriptions by using a thesaurus of design elements.
When the catalog was started 17 years ago, all fields were free text. As the catalog grew, this approach presented challenges and we progressively replaced many fields with structured data. The latest to date is series.
On Numista, series are a way to group closely related coins, for example, the 50 State Quarters Program and the Dutch Gold Rider. Instead of having a free text field for each coin where a series name could be entered, we built a database of series, which can be associated with the coins.
This approach offers several benefits for data quality:
- Storing the series once and reusing it for multiple coins ensures a certain level of consistency, which would otherwise be impossible to reach as 3000 people contribute to Numista in a year.
- Additional data can be attached to the series, such as descriptions, cross-references with Wikidata, etc.
- Translations into the 8 languages supported by Numista are facilitated, as each series needs to be translated only once rather then for each individual coin.
- It provides better visibility over the series, making it easier to identify and correct errors and inconsistencies.
Only a few free text fields remain, primarily for coin descriptions and titles. Our next objective for catalog architecture is to bring structure to the descriptions by using a thesaurus of design elements.
A significant part of Numista's recent technical developments in its numismatic catalog has focused on structuring the data to enhance its quality and consistency.
When the catalog was started 17 years ago, all fields were free text. As the catalog grew, this approach presented challenges and we progressively replaced many fields with structured data. The latest to date is series.
On Numista, series are a way to group closely related coins, for example, the 50 State Quarters Program and the Dutch Gold Rider. Instead of having a free text field for each coin where a series name could be entered, we built a database of series, which can be associated with the coins.
This approach offers several benefits for data quality:
- Storing the series once and reusing it for multiple coins ensures a certain level of consistency, which would otherwise be impossible to reach as 3000 people contribute to Numista in a year.
- Additional data can be attached to the series, such as descriptions, cross-references with Wikidata, etc.
- Translations into the 8 languages supported by Numista are facilitated, as each series needs to be translated only once rather then for each individual coin.
- It provides better visibility over the series, making it easier to identify and correct errors and inconsistencies.
Only a few free text fields remain, primarily for coin descriptions and titles. Our next objective for catalog architecture is to bring structure to the descriptions by using a thesaurus of design elements.
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