Developing a portal “Online Celtic Coinage (OCC)”: Thank you PROCOPEplus!

Thanks to funding provided by the joint Franco-German cooperation PROCOPEplus, 17 scholars from France, Germany, Czech Republic, Switzerland and Great Britain (Guernsey) met in Orléans on 30-31 January 2024 in order to discuss the development of a web portal “Online Celtic Coinage (OCC)” for the coinage of the pre-Roman Iron Age in Western and Central Europe, and Northern Italy.

The immediate aim of the meeting was to set up a consortium to pursue an application for European funding to develop the portal, as well as to discuss how existing projects and resources can be linked together and incorporated as independent modules to valorise, and so increase the impact of OCC, thereby increasing their own visibility. Further discussion focussed on the flexible reference data model that is required to cover such a range of disparate coinages, as well as the necessary additions to the core controlled vocabulary and ontology to cover the enormous variety of very disparate coinages that are to be incorprated into the portal.

OCC will follow the paradigm of existing portals such as Moneta Iberica (MIB) and Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE), and be fully incorporated into the numismatic linked open data world of Nomisma.org. It will bring together coins from museums and collections, as well as coin finds and material known only from literature, incorporating contextual, metallurgical and geodata to provide comprehensive access to a body of data of great significance for our understanding of a formative phase of the development of modern Europe.

Many thanks to all particpants for your contributions, to Sylvia Nieto-Pelletier for the invitation to Orléans, and to the team at the Centre International Universitaire pour la Recherche (Hôtel Dupanloup) for hosting us.

David Wigg-Wolf

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