The ANS has received a $10,000 grant from the Dispersed Authority Ecologies project based at Stanford University. One goal of this project, which is under the direction of Ian Morris, Josiah Ober, and Barry Weingast, is to create multiple, interacting databases focusing on different data sets from the ancient world. Greek curator Dr. Peter van Alfen has been involved in this project from its inception two years ago. The grant will be used on a joint ANS-Stanford University-French initiative to digitize the Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards.

Nomisma.org is a collaborative effort to provide stable digital representations of numismatic concepts and entities, for example the generic idea of a coin hoard or an actual hoard as documented in the print publication An Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards (IGCH). Nomisma.org provides a short, often recognizable, URI for each resource it defines and presents the related information in both human and machine readable form. Creators of digital content can use these stable URIs to build a web of linked knowledge that enables faster acquisition and analysis of well-structured numismatic data.

As a test case, Nomisma.org is developing a digital version of IGCH. All 2387 hoards have been assigned stable URIs and the text from the original publication is online. IGCH is a good dataset with which to explore the potential of nomisma.org because its stable entities, hoards as identified by a unique number, are well known within the field of ancient numismatics.