The COINS project aimed at providing a substantial contribution to the fight against illegal trade and theft of coins which appears to be a major part of the illegal antiques market. For this goal, state-of-art Information Technology have been used. The project developed standardized inventories by defining a domain ontology based on CIDOC-CRM, the standard ontology for Cultural Heritage, and a multilingual thesaurus. A Data management tools nd a specialized web search tool have been created as well.

The recognition of coins are based on new algorithms of pattern recognition and image processing, in a field (classification and identification of ancient coins) as yet unexplored. The project will disseminate its results also by means of a demonstrator freely accessible on the Internet. Substantial contribution to the project came from stakeholders, some of which are present in the partnership, which includes the Italian law enforcement organisation Carabinieri and three major national museums with important coin collections.