The Getty Information Institute - Vocabulary Program

CIDOC NEWSLETTER

Volume 9, August 1998

The Getty Information Institute - Vocabulary Program

Patricia Young

The Getty Information Institute's mission is to strengthen the presence, quality, and accessibility of cultural heritage information on global networks for research, education, and enjoyment. In working toward this goal, the Vocabulary Program produces three structured vocabularies: the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN), and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN). The Getty vocabularies are the product of more than a decade of collaborative work with several other Getty programs and independent organizations. We are also responsive to users' needs with a program of contribution and feedback. In furthering the mission of the Institute, the Vocabulary Program makes its databases available on the Institute's Web site, which provides access to browsers for each of the three vocabularies. If you are interested in contributing to any of these vocabularies, we invite you to contact us at vocab@getty.edu.

All three vocabularies, covering terms describing people, places, and things are essential tools for cataloging museum objects. They are a rich resource of terminology required to complete descriptions of cultural heritage objects, texts, and images. As knowledge representations, they can be used as search assistants to help users access diverse pieces of electronic information which may happen to use different terminology to describe the same concept. Such knowledge bases will help unlock access to information now being shared on electronic networks.

The Vocabulary Program is working with contributors to add more terminology to all three vocabularies to better represent cultures other than Western, the original strengths of the founding contributors' data. We are working now with the Smithsonian Institution on African art terms, styles and periods, and object names for the AAT, African place names, both current and historical, for the TGN, and African artists names for the ULAN.

We are eager to work with a newly formed group of anthropology museums to obtain terms representing cultures of the Americas in order to expand the scope of the AAT. We are also working with the Art Museums Image Consortium (AMICO) on a data match of AMICO records and our three vocabularies, and look forward to receiving contributions of new terms in the future.

For the ULAN, we are working with Asian art specialists to expand the representation of Asian artists. We now have a procedure for contributing terms electronically and are working with the Canadian Centre for Architecture to add 2000 architects and architectural firms to the ULAN. We will then be adding 5000 Spanish artist names contributed by the Frick Art Reference Library of the Frick Collection.

For the recently released TGN, we are interested in working with collaborators to expand the representation of historical place names, and are seeking collaborators to work with us to keep our representation of the modern world current.

Realizing the importance of language and global access to information, the Getty Information Institute also supports an International Terminology Working Group - a group of people from around the world who are working on controlled vocabularies in their own languages and are willing to share their experience. This working group has published Guidelines for Forming Language Equivalents based on the editorial policy of the AAT and ISO 5964 Multilingual Thesaurus Standard.

We invite you to view our work on the Web and to join us in making these vocabularies even richer resources to the cultural heritage community.

Patricia Young
Head, Vocabulary Program
The Getty Information Institute
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 300
Los Angeles, CA 90049-1680
United States
Email: pyoung@getty.edu