xEAC: XForms for EAC-CPF beta released

Today, two packages for a xEAC beta have been made available on github.  The following email is what I sent out to the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) list:

In early June I participated in the Linked Ancient World Data Institute at NYU, and there is a growing interest in ancient prosopography among classicists.  Having straddled both the museum and library/archival worlds, it makes sense to me to use EAC-CPF for this endeavor.  Several participants are now working together to build a network of Roman emperors and their relations.  We're in the data gathering stage at this point, but I have been working for the last six weeks an an XForms-based information management system for EAC-CPF records called xEAC (pronounced "zeke").  I think that it is ready for a beta release and have prepared two downloadable packages that can be dropped into Apache Tomcat.

Documentation: http://wiki.numismatics.org/xeac:xeac

Code: https://github.com/ewg118/xEAC

Features

• Create/edit EAC Records (majority of elements are available)
• Validation
• Integration with Geonames, Nomisma, and Pleiades for modern and ancient place names (http://wiki.numismatics.org/xeac:placeentry)
• Import names and associated authorities from VIAF (http://wiki.numismatics.org/xeac:viaf-import)
• Easily maintain links between records and create record stubs (http://wiki.numismatics.org/xeac:relations)
• Rudimentary maintenance history automation
• Simple public interface with Timemap for geography and chronologies (see example http://admin.numismatics.org/xeac/record/augustus but note there is a bug in timemap that re-centers the map on polygons)

Generic installation instructions are found at http://wiki.numismatics.org/xeac:generic_installation

xEAC will continue to evolve over the coming months.  From a numismatic standpoint, I plan to link emperors together with their families, link emperors to provincial governors, link these people to mints (corporate entities), and link mints to anonymous die carvers which are identifiable by their artistic style.  Each of these entities can be linked to affiliated coins to start, but we can eventually associate sculpture, epigraphy, and literary sources to them.