How DIANA Approach can Improve the “Diachrony” Integrating Heterogeneous Pieces of Data

Nowadays, in the field of science of antiquity, there are a lot of digital archives and web applications that allow to display ancient entities and artifacts on digital maps. Entities may include, e.g., gods, abstract personification, historical personages, etc. Artifacts may include coins, weapons, architecture, etc. In particular, ancient coins represents also out-and-out documents that need to be properly studied and analyzed. From the point of view of numismatics, there are not so many web applications enabling researchers to perform an in-depth analysis of the coin iconography. The Digital Iconographic Atlas of Numismatics in Antiquity (DIANA) aims to fulfill such a gap. It is a web application that allows to analyze the “coin iconography” according to time and space through digital maps. The DIANA's digital archive is based on a relational Data Base Management System (DBMS). The web application is developed combining both server-side and client-side programming languages. The server-side is developed using the PHP language, whereas the client-side is developed using Javascript. In order to provide users a good degree of reactiveness, DIANA has been developed adopting the Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) programming technique. In order to build digital maps, the system uses the Google Maps Platform as a Service (PaaS). A mint can be searched on DIANA considering a target coin iconography through a web form. By means of AJAX requests, data are retrieved on the DIANA's digital archive and they are sent in XML format to the user's web browser. After that, the web browser processes the received data and it forwards a second AJAX request to the Google Map PaaS that return a digital map displaying the mint and ancient coins. With DIANA it is possible to study the “diachrony” with a new innovative approach starting from ancient coins. The project has been designed with an eye toward the possibility of a future integration with other digital archives. The basic idea is to enable DIANA to analyze, besides ancient mints and coin iconographies, even other related data. Currently DIANA sites are located according to ancient mints. In other digital archives places can be located according to ancient artefacts, as well as in Pleiades (http://pleiades.stoa.org). An objective of DIANA is to link and integrate its datasets with other datasets coming from different digital archives in order to improve a particular study aggregating different pieces of information. For example, an artefact (vase, statue, vexilla etc.) depicted on a coin coming from DIANA, can be related to finds coming from other digital archives. Such a data linking may enable researchers to better understand the diachrony and the cultural context. Linking data of different digital archives it is possible exploiting different data integration techniques, e.g., importing datasets in CSV, KML and RDF format, or by means of web service (e.g., REST, SOAP, etc) interactions. DIANA is part of the LIN project, aimed at compiling the Lexicon Iconographicum Numismaticae Classicae et Mediae Aetatis (Universities of Messina, Bologna, Genoa and Milan), a dictionary whose entries record all the principal and secondary images found on ancient and medieval coins.