Open Data and APIs

Linked Data is an internationally adopted standard for presenting digital information over a network in which each subject can be uniquely identified. This standard is particularly suited for loosely structured data that do not fit in traditional databases, such as cultural heritage and scientific research data. Linked Open Data (LOD) refers to a set of practices and policies for publishing Linked Data that foster collaborative buildup and discovery of public domain knowledge by means of interconnected information publishers.

As of 2022 the Getty Vocabularies and some Getty Museum and Getty Research Institute collection data is published as Linked Open Data, with work ongoing.

The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is a set of open-source specifications for showing images online using modern web browser standards.

With IIIF (pronounced “triple-eye-eff”), images are published once and can be easily used in multiple contexts, both within and across individual collections and websites. IIIF offers native interactive features such as side-by-side comparisons, manipulation of size, scale, and focal point, and annotations aligned to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Annotation model.

In the Linked Open Data spirit, IIIF resources (images and their contextual information) can be shared, discovered, and used among institutions and individuals, using interaction patterns that remain the same across publishers.

The initiative has adopted and now actively contributes to recognized international standards, including:

• For data, Getty is a W3C Member organization and works with the Resource Description Framework (RDF), its query language, SPARQL, the JSON-LD serialization, and the SKOS data-sharing standard.
• For audiovisual materials, the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) with annotations following the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Annotation model
• For cultural heritage ontologies, CIDOC-CRM, the Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) from the International Council of Museums (ICOM) International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC), and the Linked.art working group.