Friday, August 01, 2008

The COINS Project

The COINS Project is named for it's purpose: “Combat On-line Illegal Numismatic Sales”. It's funded by the European Commission. The General Presentation says that the project is getting €820,000 of funding (equivelent to US$1,277,000) to create a data model, open source software, thesaurus for numismatics, digital reference collections, and web tools to trace stolen coins and apply the 1970 UNESCO convention and 1993 UNIDROIT convention. A lot of the research is being done by the Pattern Recognition and Image Processing Group at Technische Universität Wein.

As I mentioned before when discussing the previous work of the researchers although they plan to use the software mostly to aid police in fighting coin smuggling the tools will be very useful to collectors and researchers. It's wonderful they are making the software open source.

The group is hosting a Coin Recognition Workshop in Vienna on August 27th. I can't make it but if any of my readers go I'd love to hear of the details.

I missed a story by Martin Kugler on the project in Die Press. If any readers can understand it I'd appreciate a summary.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Pointed here by a post at Nathan Elkins's Archaeology & Numismatics, I thought I'd comment to say thankyou for your enthusiasm, and also that I was at, indeed presented at, the Coin Recognition Workshop and wrote about it here. That doesn't really cover the coin recognition papers in any detail, and nor do the proceedings, but I have a summary paper coming out early next year which will, in answer to this call for papers, and if you would like a preprint, on the understanding that it may yet be heavily revised, I can pass one on to you.