Today was a typically productive work day.  I work from home–usually from my desktop computer in my upstairs office, but today I decided to work on my laptop on my recliner in the living room, with Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes playing on the TV in the background.  I love working at home through my employer, The American Numismatic Society; I could not imagine going back to an office environment.  I think I’m much more productive at home anyway.

As I discussed this morning, I planned to further the development of the new prototype for Nomisma.org.  I made good progress in this respect.  By lunch time, I wrote a pipeline in Cocoon that would serve as a wrapper for our Fuseki RDF triplestore.  After taking the lunch break, I delved more deeply into recreating the mapping portions of Nomisma, but instead of static KML files employed by the current wiki system, I’m using XSLT stylesheets and Cocoon pipelines to generate KML dynamically from SPARQL queries, rendering the maps in OpenLayers.

Compare to the map on http://nomisma.org/id/ephesus

This map shows all of the findspots (predominantly from the Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards) for coins minted at Ephesus.

There is much work remaining to be done on this transition from the wiki to a more sustainable framework, but I feel pretty good about what I have accomplished today.  I think it’s possible to roll the new system out by the end of summer.