Schlapke abstract 2008
Numismatic databases – current status and perspectives
Numismatists have used databases for about 20 years. In addition to the management of coins in numismatic collections there are databases for coin-dealers, for coins sold at auction and of course databases for scientific use. Most important are database projects for coin finds (hoards and finds of single coins) on a national level. Today the numismatic focus of such databases is in the technical aspects of the coins (for example: size, weight, die-orientation etc.), the numismatic description (for example: denomination, ruler, mint, description of obverse and reverse) and the coin reference. These kinds of “base information”-databases often include images of the coin (obverse and reverse). You can search these databases on SQL-based queries and the database displays the result data sets often with the coin images or an image bank with lots of images of similar coins. Current developments
involve the harmonisation of the different database structures, the creation of common thesauri und the possibility of linking different databases, placed ideally on the Internet. Other projects are aimed at
creating catalogue databases of specimen coins for certain times and regions for use in the identification process of newly found coins through the comparison of pictures.
Based on the current opportunities afforded by digital image recognition and image analysis we can see a lot of new applications for numismatic databases. In addition to the base information, a new kind of information, generated by the image analysis, can be stored. On the other hand, databases can be used in classification processes and to evaluate the results of the image based coin recognition. Other research approaches can be seen in the user interfaces of the databases. There will be image based query interfaces instead of only the text-information based interfaces of today. Other impulses for changes in the development of numismatic databases come from the digital mapping of numismatic taxonomies or ontologies into the database structure. In the future there will be a new level of "interactive" numismatic databases to support numismatists and other users in their daily work with coins.